Ask HN: Is it true that any community that grows big enough, gets ruined?

Metcalfe's Law says that the value of a network is proportional to the number of nodes (or people) in the network. That is, V = k * n^2, for some constant k.

But we now know that there's more to the story. That valuable network attracts users, but it also attracts abusers - spammers, propagandists, trolls. They don't add to the value of the network; they detract from it.

Here's where the handwaving starts. It is my perception that the proportion of abusers rises as the size of the network rises. That means that the total number of abusers rises faster than the number of users - perhaps as the square of the number of users.

Worse, those abusers do more damage than their numbers would indicate. It's not just that you have messages that should be ignored. It's also that you have to increase the level of mistrust for every message. I'm going to guess that the abusers do damage about in proportion to the square of their number (which is itself in proportion to the square of the number of users).

That leaves us with V = k * n^2 - c * n^4, to account for the damage from abuse.

It follows that one essential of larger networks is keeping c as low as possible. Otherwise abuse destroys a network.

Also note that, for any given k and c, there is a number of users beyond which the value of the network is negative.

But generally speaking it's hard for a community to get better as it grows. As the community grows it begins to split because there are so many needs to satisfy so an overall feeling of dissatisfaction dominates and people become unhappy with what the community has become. We see it all the time. In extreme examples members are willing to destroy the community with out knowing how to make it better. They are just upset that what they have is not what they want. In a way they unite on the idea that they are dissatisfied. It's extremely hard to satisfy everyone all the time. And as a community grows that becomes even harder.

One way to keep unity is to have a set core of believes and unite around them by making sure everyone adheres to them. So the community focuses on the believes rather than the reduction of satisfaction.

Its why, make X great again is such an effective propaganda slogan (its been used by many groups, not just the current one)

I'm attempting a web 1.0 business experiment with a website targeted towards finding unique stuff in the city I live in. I've decided, as a philosophy, that there will be no comment section with people bickering to moderate, no email signup, no real database, no login, no data collection on my users (besides whatever google analytics tracks) - but I personally don't want to handle your data. I guess this is all to say, I'm going to see if I can avoid falling down this rabbit hole as the community grows - can I avoid ruining the website? I guess I'll see.

I think if you do it right you can monetize tastefully, but that formula is still a work in progress. I just have a sense its possible. I think most people just chase the money into oblivion trying to scale into huge companies mostly for ego? However, it's entirely possible to create little lifestyle businesses on the internet that bring in a decent salary, but don't scale to tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it would be fun to see the web return to a less chaotic place.

Technology does not have that effect, because machines aren't people. There's essentially nothing about Linux that I don't like way better now than when I started.

Lightweight tech may lose it's lightweight status, but it still runs extremely fast because of the optimization that "bloatware" usually has.

If people think it's gone downhill, then it was probably always as much of an artistic work as a technical one.

Hacker News isn't a specific tech project, and is closer to a real community, so in this case I would expect that it would go directly toiletwards if it got big.

I think the main factors are content overload and a small group of users that quickly ruin anything.

That group often isn't there at the beginning, because they don't start stuff(Making an effort is uncool), but they do like to show up and shitpost.

It doesn't take many people who really don't care, to turn a place into 4chan. Moderation can't even fix it, you just get kidz bop 4chan lite.

Within online communities that are dying there is often new life injected if they consolidate. I think the success of Linux is largely owed to big organizations that made it commercially viable. In decentralized form in something like Debian, which aims to reach as broad a base as possible, or corporate in the form of Redhat, but in each case with a growing population, real resources and unified goals.

A company like Amazon during the pandemic is I think also a good example. The logistics that their size enables and the ability to absorb sudden shocks just does not exist at any small company, and it was the big companies that kept the lights on and the goods going around. I was strongly persuaded by Tyler Cowen's book on the topic a few years ago[1].

[1]https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250110541/bigbusiness

When you join that group, you change the group. So it's a small shift whenever somebody joins. And even without a change in group membership, people change and their interests and time commitments change.

There have been many online groups that I have been a part of, that have not grown, and still gotten worse. Usually because somebody I liked became less active.

So the constant is really change. And most of us don't like change much. Sometimes change is better, that's why we stuck with the group when we joined it.

Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...

> Have you ever seen an example where anything became better than before when it grew big.

Yes, many times.

When your community is too small it’s boring, there isn’t enough user-generated content. As the community grows bigger users produce more content. Popularity encourages creative people to join and existing members to put more effort into their work (motivated by a larger audience and more competition), creating better content.

I think Geometry Dash and Trackmania are examples of communities which seem to be doing better than ever despite growing a lot the past couple years.

The issue is, when a community grows it creates disagreement: some users like different content than other users, users start to fight over which rules / goals / overall direction the community should go. Usually the overall community ends up in the middle ground, where everyone is only partially satisfied.

Case in point: Hacker News with informative / political articles. Some people only like learning, some people like tech drama and even general politics. The result is half informative, half opinionated pieces on the front page.

But it helps when the community focuses on a niche topic, and sticks to that topic even if it grows. Because that means everyone just talks about the niche, and people who aren’t and don’t get interested in it won’t join. It also helps when said topic is non-controversial and non-political, so there’s not much to disagree on and get mad about.

Trackmania’s community is still close because it is a very specific game: racing on a custom track to get the best time possible. There’s not really much else to do in Trackmania, so if you don’t like making custom tracks, trying to get the best time on one of them, or watching people do those things, you won’t like Trackmania. It’s also clearly not provocative.

Hacker News is kind of a niche because it focuses on tech from the perspective of professional software engineers. Nowadays Hacker News does get controversial, but I know it has systems and moderators in place to limit flame wars and politics as much as possible.

Large subreddits, Discord communities, Facebook groups don’t really feel like “communities” because the users’ interests are too diverse: many of the posts are uninteresting to many of the users, because it’s hard to imagine a post which can interest a majority of the users at once. They also get a lot of drama because people post about politics and those posts get encouraged and upvoted and reposted.

For example, you can't generally scale-up a machine by just multiplying all of its dimensions by, say, 2, and expect it to still work the same way. Ditto for organizations.

Scalability would generally be a problem even if you could ensure that the sorts of people involved wouldn't change. But, if you're considering a scenario where the the types of folks involved also change, then that'd probably tend to amplify the effect.

That said, systems can often be scaled-up with due consideration to how they work and ensuring that the fundamentals are kept.

https://knowingless.com/2017/05/02/internet-communities-otte...

As Acton once said[1], "absolute power corrupts absolutely".

There's something to be said for small, and there's something to be said for niche too.

[1] https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/lord-acton-writes-to-bisho...

To some extent, more people can make up for it. Eg if I go from 10 excellent artists to 1000 good ones, chances are that the top 10% artwork created actually gets better.

But eventually if you grow by lowering quality, then, well, quality drops.

I suppose for very small societies, they may be limited by discoverability/cliquiness and not quality, so their growth doesn’t mesh with quality and so they could also get better with size.

Note, “quality” doesn’t have to mean good/bad but also just “property”. When Facebook started, it was for kids from elite schools. It then gradually diluted that by lowering that particular bar. Then it was for kids from all schools. Then young people. Then their parents too. Clearly, it’s far from dying in absolute terms, but it’s certainly no longer what it initially was. To many initial users, it’s as good as dead though.

Suppose, as a thought experiment, you could create the ideal, perfect, social network or discussion board. Say, with 40 of the smartest, most creative, quirkiest, considerate people you knew. Hell: the 40 top exemplars of this on the whole planet. It would be a pretty awesome network.

(I know this because I accidentally created something like this, just by creating a small group with smart and interesting people in it. It really was surprisingly good.)

It can only get worse.

Because if you've already got the best, then anyone else you can add will be less smart, less creative, less quirky, less considerate, than who's already in the group.

And at some point you'll notice. Maybe at 50 people, or 500, or 5,000, or 50k, or 500k, or 5m, or ....

For a few reasons.

- Gradation of capabilities. These are ordinalities, not cardinalities.

- Limits to common experience and interest.

- Differences of opinion. Or morals. Or philosophy.

- Just plain scale.

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/1058991

And many new communities don't start out as highly-selective. There's something of a double-downward-wedge at play:

- If a community starts out selective and grows, it can only dilute the original cohort.

- If a community starts out antisocial, even slightly, it has a profound tendency to drive off the more pro-social members with time, what's been called "the evaporative cooling effect", or the Nazi at the Bar problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/https://blog.bumb...

https://web.archive.org/web/20101126001133/http://lesswrong....

https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...

The situation also appears with specific channels or publications. TLC was once the PBS-affiliated, NASA-sponsored The Learning Channel. H.L. Mencken's American Mercury was once a highly respected literary magazine. Both transformed tremendously. You're likely aware of TLC, the Mercury's story is probably less known today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury

There are communities that do remain reasonably coherent over time. Most of them are size-constrained, many cycle through members. Universities and colleges are classic examples of these. Most of their members, the undergraduates, remain with the institution for only a few years --- graduating in 4 or 5 typically, though many don't graduate (drop-out rates may approach 50%). Staff and faculty tend to remain longer, and provide institutional memory, though the institutions themselves provide some of that robustness as well.

There's much made of the failure of planned utopian communities, though it seems to me that the archetypal college town often strongly resembles one, and many of these have persisted for a century or more, which is longer than most other planned communes. (There ar...

People change and situation changes.

Smaller communities tend to be more familiar - people recognize each others names, and people have each other's backs, when someone is trolling or something. When things grow beyond a certain size - maybe related to Dunbar's number - the group dynamics change.

In some cases this can lead to the community to loosing coherence or even becoming toxic - but I don't think that's inevitable. I believe it IS possible to grow a community to a larger size and have it stay nice. I think though, that in order to keep a community nice when growing beyond a certain point, some effort is required - effort which wasn't necessary while the group was smaller and kinda self-organized.

Also, growing slowly rather than quickly might help - as newcomers have some time to acclimatize and internalize those unspoken social rules that govern a group's dynamic - and will be able to pass on the knowledge to those coming after. People who join a group will eventually adapt to the group - but that process needs a bit of time. But when growth is too fast, a newcomer might have more interactions with other newcomers rather than long-standing community members, and thus will adapt to something quite different.