Re:Ask HN: Is it true that any community that grows big enou...
by somenameforme on Friday May 13, 2022 @02:19AM
(#31364000)
There's a pretty interesting phenomena in life that rates of loneliness tend to be vastly higher in urban areas than in rural. [1] It makes absolutely no sense on the surface. How can a town of 1000 people have a lower rate of loneliness than a city that has several orders of magnitude more people per area?
You're definitely right that as new members join a group, the mean interests of that group change. But you can't discount the average weakening of social ties. When there are 5 people in a group everybody is going to know each other extremely well. When there are 50,000 you'll have no clue who the vast majority are and respond accordingly. When you get into the millions everybody else may as well be a one-off chatbot. Unless you purposefully create a group within the group (which is really just starting the whole process over again), your odds of seeing the same individual twice approach zero.
When you join that group, you change the group. So it's a small shift whenever somebody joins. And even without a change in group membership, people change and their interests and time commitments change.
There have been many online groups that I have been a part of, that have not grown, and still gotten worse. Usually because somebody I liked became less active.
So the constant is really change. And most of us don't like change much. Sometimes change is better, that's why we stuck with the group when we joined it.