“Critical mass” vs “network effects”

http://daltoncaldwell.com/critical-mass-vs-network-effects

by olivercameron • 14 years ago

82 37 14 years ago

daltoncaldwell.com

daemon13• 14 years ago

Excellent, very well thought out post.

First time I saw the notion of diminishing effect of adding new users.

Would be great if author elaborated on various "how to" to mitigate this.

simondlr2• 14 years ago

I think one of the best ways to do this, is to keep the social system smaller once it reaches critical mass. It sounds counter-intuitive, but hear me out.

New users that join once critical mass has been reached, will be able to create their own graph and enjoy the social network in question equally to when a person joined it 4 years ago (given the site is still the same in terms of functionality). However, the person that joined 4 years will become bogged by an ever increasing graph of connections to pages, friends, groups, history etc that eventually undermine what made the site relevant to them in the first place (ie Dalton's experience with Orkut).

So, just as in the real life, social relationships come and ago, a natural decay has to happen that allows a person's graph to remain relavent. Currently Facebook (and to a certain Google+) are doing it right. They filter. Heavily. If you don't interact with the people from 4 years ago, you just don't see them anymore on it.

jfarmer4• 14 years ago

A slightly better article on the same topic from a few years ago: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

It's funny we couch it in such intellectual language. There's an everyday word for this: Potemkin village.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

Or, a thought experiment. What's more valuable? A social network with 10,000 people who are all at most two degrees of separation from everyone else in real life? Or a social network filled with 10,000 people from around the world, selected at random?

Could you even call the second thing a "social network?"

gruseom4• 14 years ago

"Potemkin Village" isn't about original communities leaving. A Potemkin Village is a fake facade erected to hide the real thing and fool visitors.

jfarmer4• 14 years ago

Yes, sorry, I was talking about two things at once (as was the author).

There are social networks that are valuable but evaporate (see, e.g., Digg). There are "inorganic" social networks that appear valuable because they have lots of passer-bys.

Potemkim village is a good word for the latter. I'd put Google+ in that category, Robert Scoble's love affair with it notwithstanding.

caseysoftware• 14 years ago

"Potemkin Village" is what the Reddit guys started with by making thousands of accounts and sharing, commenting, etc. In that case, the fiction became reality which I (assume) is incredibly rare.

dredmorbius4• 14 years ago

Your "Potempkin Village" reference is a red herring.

What we have seen in successful (for a time) online communities have been limited, self-selecting, or gated communities. Usenet was effectively gated by requiring educational institution, technical organization, or government access, up until the Eternal September (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september), so called because of the traditional influx of fresh users at the beginning of every school year whom Usenet veterans would indoctrinate into Usenet culture. When the floodgates opened to full public usage, the ability to assimilate new users (and existing content and behavior regulation systems) failed to keep pace, and Usenet's long decline started.

Other examples include The Well, Slashdot, Digg, and even early Facebook (exclusive by decreasing degrees to Harvard, Ivy League, selective universities, any edu, and the world).

There comes a point in any network in which it desperately needs noise controls. I've been dabbling on G+, and it's lacking in this regard (even boosters such as Robert Scoble point this out fairly regularly).

dalton3• 14 years ago

Re: Eternal September, I had forgotten about that term. Every one of your comments on this thread is interesting and insightful. Thank you.

What was the term similar to "Eternal September" that described the day AOL users were able to access the web? I was one of those AOL users... I remember setting up AOL winsock so I could use Netscape and bypass all of the AOL-browser garbage (http://www.netlingo.com/word/aol-winsock.php) The day I got that all working was a great day in my teenage life :)

mrkrwtsn• 14 years ago

It's really exciting to consider how Twitter fundamentally changes how we can communicate in large groups. Essentially, through the use of hash tags, Twitter has created a new conversation/comment stream that any one in the world can be a part of. For example, while watching the Olympics, there are several hash tags that show up on screen and allow everyone from celebrities to random people talk about it. It creates a conversation that is not even possible using other mediums. They're not doing social networking better, they've created a new way to communicate. This changes mass media from being a one-way conversation to a place where anyone can participate in the conversation.

App.net simply can never do this as a result of it costing money. Since it can't build a large user base of "regular" people, the data on App.net simply won't be that interesting or very open. Sure it would be a cool service, and for many people, particularly geeks, it might be nice. It could even be a great medium to communicate with specific people, but it will never be as useful as Twitter in the sense that it will never be able to fill the same space as Twitter.

If there really is a problem with Twitter's business model that's causing cash problems all they need to do is charge for API access. Twitter's data feeds provide immensely valuable data about a large variety of issues.

te_chris• 14 years ago

They do charge for api access. You have to pay for the firehose.

kingsley_202• 14 years ago

I resent the digs at Orkut. It was a great community - if you were Brazilian or Indian. That Google chose not to run with it says more about their lack of long term social vision and parochialism than about the health of the community itself.

dredmorbius4• 14 years ago

The digs weren't so much against Orkut as about the emergence of two distinct, but conflicting, language/national cultures on Orkut, with few tools to separate them for users who weren't interested.

Curiously, I'm seeing this play out on G+ as well, which has a pretty broad international following, including a large multi-lingual contingent. There are people whose occasional English-language posts interest me, but whose non-English content is rather less compelling (you might feel similarly if I regaled you in Krell). It's part of a larger problem of poor noise controls on G+.

dalton3• 14 years ago

To be clear, it's not a "dig" at international users.

To speak from personal experience, the site that I was founder/CEO of earlier in my career, imeem, was wildly popular in the Philippines and Thailand. At peak, we were a top 20 site in the Philippines, according to Alexa.

We spent a lot of time adding country-specific filters to music charts, comments, etc once tagalog and thai started seeping into every page of the site.

We loved our foreign users, but from an advertising business perspective, a user in southeast asia is worth a small fraction of a US or UK user. The relative low value of developing country users to brand advertisers is the primary reason sites like Orkut, Friendster, Hi5, etc ended up in the place they are.

It's not a question of nationalism, it really does boil down the what the advertising market is willing to pay. This is one additional factor re:why ad-supported social platforms end up with mis-aligned incentives w/users...

kingsley_202• 14 years ago

I would invest the same way (focus on users in developed economies) if it were my startup - but Google isn't a startup. When you have two of the BRIC economies sewn up in a social network, AND you have cash to stay for the long game, I think you're doing your shareholders a disservice by not sticking it out.

epaik• 14 years ago

This effect seems to happen commonly among news aggregating site communities.

Digg used to be pretty cool when it was used largely by people excited about the start-up/tech enthusiasts. As it became more popular, the user-base seemed to devolve as the content started to cater to the LCD.

Reddit has done a good job combating this, with their implementation of subreddits that focus on specific core user demographics. But most of their largest subreddits have a dubious quality of users.

Hacker News seems to have the best quality of discourse/users at the moment, but I attribute this to its relatively small user-base.

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

> Hacker News seems to have the best quality of discourse/users at the moment, but I attribute this to its relatively small user-base.

50 to 100 thousand daily users ("users", not visitors) is not small by any means!

dredmorbius4• 14 years ago

At Internet scale (~2 billion connected users) it's minuscule.

0.005% of all available users.

Within the United States, it would fall well below the 100th most widely circulated print magazine, as a monthly circulation statistic. I'll assume that monthly stats are a few times higher than the daily usage metric, but you'd still have to hit roughly 1 million to break into the top 100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_magazines_by_circulati...

From an advertising perspective, unless you're extremely focused in your interest base (and there are markets of interest within the HN readership), it's tiny.

NHQ• 14 years ago

Social networking services and APIs are not the utility. The Internet is the utility.

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

I think what the author is talking about is the spamminess/internet-y-ness that has crept into Facebook in the last few years.

But that is something that I think most Facebook users at least try to ignore. The goodness and desirableness of Facebook happens despite this stuff rather than because of this stuff. Facebook has been a place where a lot of people like to come to chat with their friends (duh!). This kind of virtual tavern is something that a lot of people enjoy. But the problem is that Facebook has succeed so well at being that kind of place, that the limitations of being that kind of place are showing; suddenly realize you just own the nightclub, you're not the most popular person in the nightclub. And making grandiose statements on the nightclub loud speaker isn't going to make you more popular.

- Being the place where people talk to their friends does mean you can sell people anything (they don't come to buy but to chat).

- There are plenty of things that it's in people's better interests not to share and sooner or later they'll figure that out - when they do, they don't appreciate being previously mislead and get more closed about the entire medium (it's interesting how the telephone produced a lot of same ).

- And there are many reasons to step outside your circle of friends. And completely outside is both easier and safer than any conceivable "multiple circles" system.

Facebook's stuff lately has been butting-up against these limitation but not overcoming them. I don't know these can be directly overcome with the "I will monetize my efforts" approach and if they can't, it might be good.

dm8• 14 years ago

I do agree that Twitter's asymmetric model works. And Google + also have same feature. I don't have to be "friend" with someone to follow them.

Having signed up on Orkut in 2004, and used that social n/w quite regularly for ~ 4 years. People forget the beauty of Orkut. In someways they were ahead of times -

1. Privacy: Privacy settings were impeccable. In fact, it would notify you if someone visited your profile too. So no more "stalking". Believe it or not, Orkut never allowed search engines to index their pages.

2. Communities: Facebook groups are quite popular now. But still, Orkut communities in 2005 were better. They were malleable. You could turn them into forums/boards for discussion. Group announcements. Group Polls etc. And most importantly owners/mods had ability to make any content public/private with simple switch.

3. Testimonials: LinkedIn started with this "recommendations" feature. But Orkut had "testimonials" since its beginning. It was fun reading testimonials once in a while.

4. Design: Orkut's design during initial years was the best any social network could have. Simple and clean!

5. Search: I've used majority of the social networks. Orkut's search engine was simply the best. It's search engine in 2005 could easily beat FB's search even today.

What led to Orkut's downfall? I've heard form Googlers that there was no strong internal support to Orkut. In 2008 they started copying FB and it became unusable since it had worst UX due to this. And last but not the least, Facebook's Feed. Feed was game-changer for FB and it's eventual growth.

Edit: Grammar

dalton3• 14 years ago

You are correct about many of these points.

The other thing worth mentioning re:Google internal support is that Orkut had some, um, early controversy: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/06/64046

kbenson• 14 years ago

In his bid to get more viewers of his blog, and thus more perspective signups for join.app.net which he links to in every post, Mr. Caldwell has put out more interesting articles on the social space than I've seen in a long, long time.

App.net seems like an interesting experiment, and I support it in theory, but don't really use much of social networks so haven't contributed yet. I think I'm going to give him $50 just to see if he can sustain the same level of output on his blog, as my own little experiment.

breckinloggins• 14 years ago

I agree. It just goes to show you that marketing and self-promotion only make you look like a sleazy used-car salesman when you have nothing interesting to say.

simondlr2• 14 years ago

App.net's approach won't solve the problems that Dalton here talks about. Does he have plans that will solve this?

JVIDEL• 14 years ago

I just want to say is funny how some people downplay Orkut for being full of Brasilians and Indians when those are 2 of the most growing consumer markets in the world.

You have companies all over the world fighting to get those markets, Apple went as far as building a factory in Brasil to get a foothold there.

russtrpkovski• 14 years ago

The In the Plex book provides some insights into why Orkut failed:

1. As Orkut increased in popularity, it was flooded with identity thieves and Viagra ads.

2. Google focused on rewriting Orkut's Windows-based infrastructure to scale on Google's platform instead of improving the design and adding features

3. Users bailed because of poor response time. Brazilians and Indians used to slow Internet access so they were tolerant of the delays.

4. While finishing the rewrite of Orkut, Facebook was starting to take off.

Sniffnoy• 14 years ago

I feel it is worth pointing out here that asymmetry is not original to Twitter. Consider e.g. LiveJournal.

pdog• 14 years ago

I think Mr. Caldwell makes a convincing argument that there needs to be a compelling (not ad-supported) alternative to Twitter. My question is this: Why can't this alternative have a "free tier" that allows the average user to access and use the service without paying and have additional features available to those who pay for them?

In determining a payment model for app.net, it seems he's never addressed why there isn't a free tier...

nrmehta• 14 years ago

Thought-provoking post. To me, one way to determine whether a system will have network effects or anti-network effects is to ascertain how much of its usage is driven by fashion versus utility. Take email as an extreme example of the latter. It's valuable because it's so universal - but it's not fashionable at all. It's a pure utility. So no anti-network effects (perhaps beyond spam but those are less about #s of participants as behavior). I put Facebook in an intermediate category where it's transitioned reasonably well from fashion to a utility, though the folks that looked at it as fashion are now getting more turned off by it. Indeed, the anti-network effect isn't simply about numbers - it's about who is coming into the network and a lost feeling of exclusivity (which honestly sometimes picks on very base human emotions) when the network grows with certain types of people. I think twitter has moved further up the utility value chain than facebook has so I'd posit it's less vulnerable to anti-network effects (not to mention the asymmetric follow model that dalton talks about).

“Critical mass” vs “network effects”

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