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The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Social Networks (2010)

blogs.cornell.edu

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Re: The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Social Networks (2010)

#3
post #2

Previous discussion: The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Online Communities — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665 (2010, 35 comments) https://archive.ph/q8DlQ

That’s a different discussion, because this one has the added benefit of being from a cornell.edu domain! /s

The submission here is also more of a discussion of that post, so this thread would be a discussion of a discussion, not direct comments on the article.

Re: The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Social Networks (2010)

#4
Doesn't this complaint assume a strict stack-ranking of contributors, where the "top" person has no reason to stay and thus leaves, and then the new top does the same, etc?

Which is not at all how actual humans and relationships work. We each bring different value to the table, along multiple dimensions.

Re: The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Social Networks (2010)

#8
Isn't this model a bit outdated with prevalence of likes and retweets?

Users on modern social platforms optimize output to maximize favorable responses, thereby gratification. There are not really ceilings, barrier to entry, or way around the system, so it's resistant to spams and manipulations.

Classical BBS systems did have this problem. It was said that a community beegins with interesting people posting interesting topics, then uninteresting people joins to read interesting topics, and ends when uninteresting people starts posting uninteresting topics.

What was missing was feedback signaling, and social media got past this at some point during 2010s.

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