the generosity alorithm

Here’s what I’m thinking when I’m making…

My website launched last week and got lots of love. It was awesome. But in the middle of it I get this Etsy order for a couple of musician masks with a frantic note asking me to rush it. Now, I could be like “Sorry, not my problem. I’ve got other things going on this week. You’ll get it when you get it.” But instead, I totally understood this parent’s situation and it’s not the first time it’s happened. Their kid gave them a deadline. They have a performance. They need a mask and their parent’s really just trying to get it to them and keep their kid safe.

So I busted out the order including an additional mask in a larger size, knowing that this package is going to arrive right when they need it and if it doesn’t fit, they’re up the creek.  Not much skin off my back to do this and there’s actually a lot of value in that for me knowing that I could be helping them out of a really stressful situation.

Now it’s been about 5 months since anyone has ordered one of these masks, so the timing of it is really curious to me.  It’s got me wondering.

“Is all the good energy around my website launch also then carrying over to my Etsy shop?”

“Is this how algorithms work on social media?”

I’ve been listening a lot to this podcast, Pivot, and they’re talking about how the algorithms support conflict (trolling divisive threads) and this drives traffic and thus advertising dollars.  You know, it’s a business.  But could that business be different? What if there was an algorithm where the stimulus is generosity, rather than conflict?  Maybe instead of trolls, nasty anonymous comments, cyber-bullying …maybe the stimulus for the algorithm to bring something to the top of our feed is someone being kind? Would we then, as human animals, as we are, then mimic that behavior and pass it forward ….making things like generosity and kindness sort of contagious.

What do you think?