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.
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.
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7012443/