Richness of Social Interaction in the Internet Age
There is a whole bunch of things that can be discussed on the nature of social interaction on the Net. Social dynamics are
very interesting. Most popular sites experience an early period of intense activity. As the community grows, first there is a growth on social involvement of its users, that can be measured by the average number of comments and messages left per user; but later, the sheer growth of the site causes a dillution of its base, in such a way that the social interaction is gone. Why does it happen?
I have a few ideas of my own regarding this problem. A very simple one is the "novelty effect" thesis: people go to new places, and forget it quickly, going to some other place. Although probably right to some extent, it's also fairly simple minded, and probably can't explain all the behavior involved. Another alternative is the "optimum size" thesis; it says that any community has an optimum size that maximizes social interaction. Examples are cities - small cities have a too small population, metropolis have it too big, and the optimum lies somewhere inbetween.
Another alternative is the "hierarchy of attractors". In this model, individuals are divided in two classes (using Internet-related analogies here): 'content generators' and 'readers'. In other words, some people like to write content, other ones like to read and comment sometimes. Great content generators become 'attractors', and remove some of the traffic from lesser writers. But this also reduces the richness of the media, and reduces the level of social interaction. In this model, the more people you have, the biggest the difference between the top-level attractors and the low level ones will be.
How can a big community handle these problems? By breaking it up - pretty much like the biggest and most succesfull cities in the world do. New York is the prime example of this - a big city with lots of small (and lively) communities. The Internet has to do the same. However, this does not mean that it will become fragmented or balkanized. But this is a big enought topic for another story.
