Mark
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 Posted: June 13, 2003 3:56 PM |
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| As I mentioned in a recent post, I have always thought that so-called online community sites were never really successful in creating a community atmosphere. While reading some great stuff recently by Clay Shirky, I came across an article about Communities, Audiences, and Scale that provides a good explanation about my prior observations about community sites. Essentially, the bigger a group gets, it becomes harder to act and feel like a community because it becomes impossible for members to know each other: "This barrier to the growth of a single community is caused by the collision of social limits with the math of large groups: As group size grows, the number of connections required between people in the group exceeds human capacity to make or keep track of them all." This is an important point for software makers and web developers - this is a human limitation, you can't code around it. It raises interesting questions. Should community sites limit membership or become more like audiences? And is there something in between a community and an audience model? And if there is, what is it and how do its members interact? I have been thinking a lot about groups, reputations systems, emergent democratic systems, and distributed collaborative efforts lately -- and this issue of group size and it's affects on group interaction is a significant one. I am going to continue to ponder these and other questions further. |
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