Useful Redundancy

On the daily puppy they post pictures of cute puppies. They also have ratings and comments for each puppy. The ratings I’ve seen end up between 10 and 11 (the highest). The comments all use varying degrees of hyperbole to describe how cute the puppy is.

The ratings and comments seem redundant to me, yet I bet people wouldn’t enjoy the site as much without them. (I always browse them) Why is that? I see the same kind of redundant chatter on many websites (digg comes to mind). I wonder if this fills the same role as small talk in the real world? I guess any web site looking for an audience needs to provide opportunities for this kind of chatter.