I've recently thought about a few questions I have regarding the inner workings of SG, so excuse my rambling train of thought please. This was partly prompted by a post from Nate @karanlit who was in a sad mood because she couldn't understand why her latest and very beautiful and popular set hadn't (at the time of this writing) been picked up for Set of the Day. Now, we all know that we know nothing about how Sets of the Day are really chosen - it can't be only the number of likes, so it must be something else in addition to that. Some have pointed out that it is "networking" and being active and accessible, but @karanlit is no slouch in that department and as she mentions, others with far less activity have gotten FP.
I imagine that with the total number of SGs now approaching 3,000 it gets more and more difficult to distribute SOTD in a fair manner. Established SGs keep producing fine new sets, and at the same time you want to pink new Hopefuls as well, maybe even if they're less accomplished or perfect. You'll remember that for a short while some years ago there were two Sets of the Day, but that didn't last long, and the concept of a "Set of the Morning" and "Set of the Afternoon" kind of devalues the idea of SOTD.
One additional problem is that as soon as you become an SG (I imagine) there is not anything much more you can accomplish. If you're competitive, you may aim for more followers, and more Sets of the Day, but that is basically all you can do. The top-ranked SGs in terms of followers (and I go over that list for fun sometimes) have basically a "lock" on Front Page - if a @riae or @sash has a new set, their huge number of followers alone should guarantee that. A little further down, it gets more complicated. I love and adore @fay for instance but she has, at last count 12 Sets of the Day, while @karanlit (who actually has more followers) has just one so far. It could be that Latin America has more of an internal lobby than Russia has, if you want to put it that way - although on the other hand we have seen many Russian Hopefuls turn pink in the last year. BTW, my all-time fave @drave has 6 between 2006 and 2013, which comes to about one per year.
One more thought - there are huge differences among the girls in terms of activity. For some, achieving SG status is a one shot thing; they do everything they can to get pink, then basically disappear. Others, and they are the ones with lasting popularity, do participate in the community and interact with the members.
Poring over the numbers is interesting, at least to me! There has been some movement in the Top 50, and we continue to see once super popular SGs slip in their ranking because they've become archived (like @lass @dimples or @kemper ). Archived SGs don't produce new sets, giving room for others to move up. I'm impressed that there are now 6 SGs with >50,000 followers, although this makes me wonder how many members are actually active and involved on the site as opposed to being mere consumers of sets. New sets from even the top most popular SGs rarely break 3,000 or maybe 4,000 likes while in MR or even on the FP - why doesn't a new set from @riae with close to 70,000 followers get, you know, close to 70,000 likes?
Speaking of sets, I've found another interesting statistic - you'll have to go pretty far down the list of the most popular sets to find a recent one; the vast majority of the most popular sets is 7, 8, 9 or 10 years old. The most popular set that is less than 5 years old is from @fishball at #62. So even where the number of members has gone up, the popularity numbers of new sets hasn't kept up. I wonder why that is?
Oops, that went on a LOT longer than I intended...thoughts?
