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That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the l

by buro9 13y ago

That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the limited Q&A space. The reason it's the wrong question is that Q&A is merely one form of communication that can exist within a community. Conversations (forums) are another. News/Link/Image sharing (the reddits, HNs, Diggs, Slashdot, etc) are another. Even e-commerce has communities (through reviews and recommendations - Amazon reviews are an example). Communities are merely groups of people that have a shared interest and agree to use some form of communication to collaborate around that interest. I would argue that Reddit is a great example of a community that allows the type of division I describe (through subreddits). Reddit shows that by doing so that they are able to keep the quality very high with a low and highly varied moderation policy at every applicable level of scope. Communities don't scale. But providing tools that allow them to naturally divide into smaller communities increases the total size of that group of communities whilst retaining a high quality and low moderation effort within each area. Edit: You've edited to add another line, but maybe you want to read this: http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html (Audiences scale, communities don't) . Also, I think the Tragedy of the Commons applies http://dieoff.org/page95.htm http://dieoff.org/page95.htm and on Kuro5hin back in the day that argument was made fairly well and relates to the problems of scaling a community: http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2002/1/17/21155/1564/46#46 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2002/1/17/21155/1564/46#46

camus2 13y ago
> That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the limited Q&A space. You're basically saying SO system is broken, I say it is not because nobody has done better at that scale. Doesnt mean it is perfect,just mean it's the best thing we've come up with yet.You cant prove me wrong on that. And SO is a QandA , it's not an image/link/sharing recommendation system, you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not.
- buro9 13y ago
  > you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not. They are. They are all a form of content management system for a community or group. And I'm not saying SO is broken, I'm saying communities don't scale. You can certainly tweak a community to get it farther down the road than other comparable communities (tags do this well for SO), but to imagine you've dodged the reality that communities don't scale is wrong. Instead we should look at how things scale in societies, and they do so by splitting themselves into manageable sized groups... cliques, microcosms of the whole, each potentially a part of a larger clique and host to ever smaller cliques but all with the same capabilities. You cannot scale a single community, but you can perform a sleight of hand (e.g. subreddits) to allow a natural sub-division of the whole into many smaller communities that collectively have scaled the parent microcosm (the parent itself is a subset of a society or the larger global population). Disclaimer: I build community software, and I realised I've gone and used the company name in my writing.
- makomk 13y ago
  By that argument, it's impossible for the most popular website in any area which has significant network effects to be flawed, which is just ridiculous.

by buro9 13y ago

camus2 13y ago

> That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the limited Q&A space. You're basically saying SO system is broken, I say it is not because nobody has done better at that scale. Doesnt mean it is perfect,just mean it's the best thing we've come up with yet.You cant prove me wrong on that. And SO is a QandA , it's not an image/link/sharing recommendation system, you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not.

buro9 13y ago
> you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not. They are. They are all a form of content management system for a community or group. And I'm not saying SO is broken, I'm saying communities don't scale. You can certainly tweak a community to get it farther down the road than other comparable communities (tags do this well for SO), but to imagine you've dodged the reality that communities don't scale is wrong. Instead we should look at how things scale in societies, and they do so by splitting themselves into manageable sized groups... cliques, microcosms of the whole, each potentially a part of a larger clique and host to ever smaller cliques but all with the same capabilities. You cannot scale a single community, but you can perform a sleight of hand (e.g. subreddits) to allow a natural sub-division of the whole into many smaller communities that collectively have scaled the parent microcosm (the parent itself is a subset of a society or the larger global population). Disclaimer: I build community software, and I realised I've gone and used the company name in my writing.
makomk 13y ago
By that argument, it's impossible for the most popular website in any area which has significant network effects to be flawed, which is just ridiculous.