Nice piece, was talking to a friend about this yesterday, particularly regarding online community. Our conjecture ended up being that communities don’t scale, w

Nice piece, was talking to a friend about this yesterday, particularly regarding online community. Our conjecture ended up being that communities don’t scale, which is why Twitter fails, and Facebook too with the exception of groups, which often seem to work well. We were riffing around the communities we’d belonged to that really had a sense of “belonging” attached to them, and the common thread was that smaller sized groups seemed more likely to “work”, and certainly remained more sensible and civilised. HN is one of the few large online communities I know that still remains really civil, however I don’t ever feel like I “know” anyone on here, which I think is about the specifics of the UI - you don’t follow people, you follow ideas. All of this reminds of of Derek Powazec’s book which is easily the best one I’ve read on fostering and growing online communities: https://www.amazon.com/Design-Community-Derek-Powazek/dp/0735710759 https://www.amazon.com/Design-Community-Derek-Powazek/dp/073... What particularly resonated in the article was where he mentions how a group needs an individual or a few individuals to push it along, as a sort of binding, driving element. This is absolutely my experience, both in running tech meet-ups and barcamps but also in online groups too.