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I had an interesting experience with a WhatsApp group recently. In the past, WhatsApp groups had an upper limit of 256 participants. They then increased this to

• ibaikov 2y ago
  I had similar experience on Telegram where groups that grew in size plummeted in quality. I just came up with the following concept reading your comment: a slowmode, so that people can write once every x minutes, but others who are mostly read-only can give 'points' to those writing messages in the moment to bypass slowmode, basically they are voting for quality discussions to continue.
  • haolez 2y ago
    This would need to be dynamic, since a delay that works for a group of 1,000 would probably clutter a group of 100,000. And if all users post at the exact same time, slow mode doesn't help. But maybe there's value in solving this problem :) Interesting idea!
    • baby_souffle 2y ago
      > But maybe there's value in solving this problem :) Traditional topics/channels? The reason why sites like HN/Reddit ... etc "work" is because you've got to click into the comments on some post to see those comments. You're not going to the hacker news front page and just getting _all_ the comments nor is some algorithm deciding which posts/comments you should see and which you'll never know about. Threads work - to a point - but at some meaningful scale, you need all these CTOs on a server with sub-sets of them in various channels dedicated to particular conversational themes. The more accessible a community becomes, the more important consistent moderation is... otherwise it'll just go downhill fast.
      • ibaikov 2y ago
        Nope, topics don't work. Telegram added topics and you can add them to the group chat, but it killed almost every chat that I have seen add it. What happens is people start conversations on random themes and this additional friction of posting to the right topic kills the motivation to post at all. Also, people start to only open topics they like in the group, and close the group if there's nothing to see in these topics. If there were none - they could find something interesting for them randomly, or answer some question, but they just won't find it because they only check topics they like. It also feels more strict, like a confluence wiki of questions/situations and you can't effortlessly chat about something.
        • bradleykingz 2y ago
          [dead]
  • PhilippGille 2y ago
    There is https://slowsocial.us https://slowsocial.us for "write once per week", but no upvoting to remove the limit.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    Yeah there probably are a few hundred great/exceptional CTOs who would find value being in a group. There likely aren’t thousands. There certainly aren’t tens of thousands.
  • anal_reactor 2y ago
    The problem with community-based moderation is that the group quickly turns into an echo chamber
• OJFord 2y ago
  > This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties). And if it's possible to keep the sales people away, or at least invite-only. It's probably not quite as exclusive as you're imagining (certainly not as much as your 256 max 'CTOs 1'), but we're kind of in one aren't we? It can be done, it just takes substantial effort from a dedicated moderation team. I helped moderate a traditional forum (Computer Juice, née The Computer Forums) in the late 00s maybe slightly into 2010s, I don't know how 'rich and insightful' it was, that wasn't really what it was about, but it served its purpose for a handful of regulars and guests that dropped by one time for part selection advice or because they had a 'blue screen of death', nothing like HN traffic I'm sure but that too would've been overrun with spam and ads if not for a few of us keeping on top of it. You can't just set and forget, not with open membership anyway - and something like WhatsApp would probably always struggle with that because you don't have a great way to give much prominence to something Stripe CTO (for example) says vs. the keen doe-eyed cofounder CTO whose also currently the entire engineering team but hoping to make a first hire and talking the talk, sharing lots of random Medium articles on hiring practices and building hypergrowth teams etc.
  • welder 2y ago
    I'm solving this in my social network by requiring karma from other networks before someone can post
    • financetechbro 2y ago
      How does this solve the problem?
• fragmede 2y ago
  There's a paper to be written to do a modern day calculation of Dunbar's number as applied to group chats, where above that, real-time chat simply doesn't scale because of the aforementioned problems.
• verticalscaler 2y ago
  > This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties). And if it's possible to keep the sales people away, or at least invite-only. You can't keep sales people a.k.a phonies away it will always happen. Every underground subculture gets appropriated as soon as even one of these people shows up. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_punk_subculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_punk_subculture Imagine you run into Patti Smith and her friends in the 70s, if you're lame you won't be staying long. In fact you might get punched in the face. There is proper gatekeeping. Once the scene grows even a little there's money to be made. A different sort shows up who understands the culture and likes the music OK but don't truly give a fuck it is about selling t-shirts and bootlegs for them. And/Or getting laid. They'll start promoting it to grow it bigger and make more money. That's when the real sharks show up and the original members start leaving. Later still normies shop your style at the mall with no idea what any of it means or where it came from. Sadly, can't punch people in the face over the internet. Even worse everything is all about forced inclusivity now. This ain't a technological problem.
  • astrange 2y ago
    > Sadly, can't punch people in the face over the internet. Even worse everything is all about forced inclusivity now. Nobody is going to do that anymore because we don't all have lead poisoning from gasoline fumes.
    • verticalscaler 2y ago
      wat?
      • astrange 2y ago
        If you're old enough you might remember Americans were much more violent from 1960 to 1995 or so and the crime rate was incredibly high in American cities, leading to what was called white flight. Now, if you work with young people (so-called zoomers), you'll notice they are absolutely not like this anymore. At least 30% of this was caused by everyone breathing leaded gasoline.
• pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > the group chat was quickly infested with people trying to sell stuff (cloud services, HR services, etc) In one Slack I'm in, I can usually spot these people within 30 seconds, and as soon as they confirm my suspicions, I grab the banhammer.
  • Nition 2y ago
    Good moderation is certainly a huge factor in keeping a large chat going. Hacker News is a pretty good example.
• dredmorbius 2y ago
  On the little-lamented Google+, I'd long noted that larger groups often had abysmally poor discussion quality. Most were overrun with self-promoters, scammers, and to an extent, advertising (not officially supported, but certainly present). You can see a similar trend on group-discussion sites such as Reddit. I don't know what the hard-and-fast rule for "best discussion quality" is, and of course that metric will vary by topic and community. I'm pretty sure that this is strongly at odds with the interests of advertisers, for which the goal seems to be to aggregate the largest collection of eyeballs possible at a single venue or channel. On Reddit, I've noted that discussion quality seems to tank strongly at some point between ~10k and 1m subscribers. Note that subscribers != active participants, but it's a rough proxy. Looking right now at a subreddit I'd found at least somewhat useful at 100k members, it's now boasting north of 500k and ... while not a cesspit as occurs elsewhere, the overall quality is markedly lower. I had the opportunity to do some detailed analysis of overall statistics of Google+ groups (over 8 million in total at the time of the site shutdown), and activity vs. other parameters. In particular, it seems that measureable interactions (+1s, shares) scale most directly with post activity rather than total community members, which makes some sense. G+ was around long enough that "subscribers" was only very vaguely related to actual participants (as is undoubtedly the case on Reddit as well). In particular, I noted that the most active profiles also seemed highly prone to going inactive or being deleted or removed (I'm not sure which). I suspect that that was a mix of spam accounts (whether created as such initially or converted / hijacked later), and of simple burnout or disaffection. A recent post about interactions on a blog offered a similar observation, and my read is that each individual interaction is an opportunity to push someone over the edge, and that audience cultivation is a balance of bringing aboard new members whilst minimising loss of old. Blocking dynamics on other platforms (I've witnessed this on G+, Diaspora*, Mastodon/Fedivers, Ello, Slashdot, and Usenet, amongst others) is somewhat similar, and seems to me to great interesting network topologies as connections are made and broken. I've also experimented with small groups of active members and found that ~50 people really does seem to be a sweet point, though even there perhaps 15 or fewer were highly-active participants. (I was the administrator of that group, and knew all the participants, if largely online-only.) I've also seen small groups persist over years or decades, and watched those stale and spin off members with time. Unfortunately, without fresh blood, that seems all but inevitable, and recruiting new members is a challenge. See groups such as The Well (still extant) as long-lived examples. Many members there are now entering their dotage, if not having passed through the other side of it... Dave Winer's observation still stands: conversation doesn't scale very well. I think that's innate, and part of the magic when it does emerge.
• nvarsj 2y ago
  Moderation is absolutely essential past a certain critical mass of users (probably 100). So ultimately, the demise of your group is the fault of the admin.