Social immortality: evaporative cooling effect in social

Social immortality: evaporative cooling effect in social

The person who wants to know others most is also the one who most people don't want to know. The person who wants to date most is the one who most wants to date. The person who wants to talk the most is the one who does not want to hear him.

Much social software only fail because they ignore this most basic principle. I call it the evaporative cooling problem. And I believe that unless the designer wants to see their product slowly become a dirty, mediocre lump, the public problem must be solved in any collection.

The evaporative cooling effect was learned from a wonderful article by Eliezer Yudowsky about the special phenomenon of group dynamics. This effect refers to the phenomenon that occurs when most of the high-value contributors in an ecological community find that the community is unable to provide what they need and thus leave. Once this happens, the quality of the community will decline, and the second-highest contributor will find that the community becomes mediocre. The disappearance of each layer reduces the quality of the group until the last unskilled and unconscious person, who simply cannot know that he is in a mediocre group.

Evaporative cooling effects are dynamic phenomena that can occur in both real-world and online communities. But the self-interpretation of the Internet makes it more susceptible to this effect. By observing the social structure in the real world, we can find some ways to cause evaporative cooling and how to prevent it.

The first case: open group

Moving to San Francisco, I thought I opened up the social architecture around the network. There are public gatherings, events and a variety of "landscapes". Accompanied by a set of activities in the shadows, private, non-incoming, and exclusion, these are the real vitality in the valley. You may live in the San Francisco Valley for a lifetime, walk around gently and happily and never know the existence of the ecosystem in this shadow. You may go to the same event every week to see the same entrepreneurs, social media marketers, CEOs of idiots, bloggers, and celebrities who are occasionally forced to attend for professional reasons.

However, if you can develop your network properly, you will have the opportunity to find the entrance to the shadow economy. As for the depth you want to enter this rabbit hole, it depends on your own abilities and desires. For the exclusion of each layer, you are almost certainly rejected by a deeper layer. Some places are well known: TED Congress, Davos, Sun Valley. But compared to every party you know, there is at least a thousand exclusivity, you have never heard of it. After a while, you will be registered on what I call Groucho Marx's Law. You will stop participating in all the activities you can attend.

Experience:

The opening is the first driving force for evaporative cooling. If anyone can join your group, then the most likely to participate in those levels is because they can get the most. Once they enter, they will be harmful to the long-term health of the group unless they are tolerated. Groups that have a choice of participants will be more immune to evaporative cooling effects. Unfortunately, most website businesses have no choice but to open their business. Most Web 2.0 businesses rely on extracting a small amount of value from a huge number of users and expect users to explode and thus don't have to worry about your exit. Establishing a prosperous community of more than 10,000 members in 10 years is not enough to pay the bill.

The second example: social guards?

One of the communities I attended was called BayCHI. This community has been around for more than 20 years, and the quality of the chat and the people involved in the community today are still very good, and it seems that it has only slightly received the effects of evaporative cooling. Why is this? A large part of the reason is what I call the role of the social guard. A social janitor is a mechanism that allows participants to choose among groups. In BayCHI's case, a social janitor is the narrow and understated nature of the content. First of all, only those who are really interested in the content and can take 3 hours from their lives to participate in the conversation will participate. This has set the minimum threshold.

¦ Experience:

The social janitor is a powerful, and unlike other methods of exclusion, social guards can work in larger environments, especially in today's rapidly growing Internet environment. However, this is a more subtle approach that requires more agile management. The niche market approach is just one type of social guard, and charging is another popular practice.

There are actually a lot of nuances. For example, spelling is an interesting social guard. Just saw a forum, if they can't understand their context, they are immediately placed inside or outside a border. Another extreme example is Quora, which had an incredible Orwell-style system in its early days, and Quora employees routinely check and edit your answers to correct spelling and grammar mistakes. I will start talking about this issue.

The third example: power ladder 

One of the activities I attended this week, the quality of the participants is very high, this event is called Warm Gun. The room has a design director at Facebook and a design director at Google. How did Dave McClure get these two people into one room? In fact, he put them on the pulpit. He asked them to participate in a discussion about how designers and engineers can work together better. He used special treatment as a bait to attract these very busy and high-value people and let them come to the same room with our farmers.

¦ Experience:

The different roles of the participants can help change the power ladder and eliminate the evaporative cooling effect. When the community is small, the process can be managed at a social level. High-value participants receive special treatment because they have recognition and respect from the community. But when the community is large, these social mechanisms are not working, and if there is no alternative mechanism, high-value participants will be particularly annoyed by the loss of special recognition, which will speed up the evaporative cooling.

A clear reputation system like karma may be the most popular non-average role method in online communities. However, for some reason, online communities are particularly resistant to elite promotion structures that are common in the real world. In academia, high school students must enter the university through competition. College students need to become doctoral students through competition. Doctoral students need to compete to become teaching assistants. Teaching assistants must also compete for tenure, and tenured professors must compete as department heads. I really can't think of any online community that has a similar power structure. I will consider this question carefully in the future.

The fourth case: the square and the large courtyard?

Finally, I want to analyze one of the most successful technology systems I think can be applied to quality maintenance: Facebook. I joined the company when Facebook had only one million users. Since then, user size has increased by 500 times and my user experience has only dropped by 50%. The reason for this is that when a random user joins in Brazil, his impact on my experience is negligible. Because every user can only see the small Facebook area he is in, each user has direct control over their experience. I'm afraid you will think that this is a proprietary attribute of social networks, and Orkut is messed up by some random users in Brazil. Facebook's design, especially in the early stages, has a special meaning for this design dilemma, so it has been superbly designed around this issue.

Experience:

There are two basic modes of social organization, which I call the "square mode" and the "big house model." In the plaza mode, there is a central square where everyone can interact and this interaction is publicly visible. In the large courtyard mode, space is divided into a series of smaller hospitals, you can only see the hospital where you are currently. You can move to an adjacent hospital, but it is not easy to go to a place far from your area. The square grows by increasing its scale, and the compound grows by adding more houses.

This is the two basic modes of social space. Every social space can be divided into a group of squares and a house. On Facebook, your profile, friends and news center are the yards, fan pages, and the combined event is the square. Twitter is mainly a house, but some trend themes belong to the square. In the forum, the home page and the list of topics are squares, but each sub-forum is complex.

Squares and hospitals have their own advantages and disadvantages. As we all know, the courtyard is difficult to establish. New users are trapped in empty yards and don't know how to connect with other activity hubs.

The hypervisor is critical and has not been fully understood until now (the Friendfeed site found that people must have at least 5 friends to have access to the service). On the other hand, the square only needs to be established once and then it can remain active, and new users can participate in the first day.

The visibility of the square is much higher than that of the courtyard, so it is easy to observe and understand your community. In the community, as with justice, sunlight is the best anti-drug, and those neglected spaces can often develop into breeding grounds for social metamorphosis.

An absolutely powerful feature of the large complex is that it allows your community to expand indefinitely and grow wildly, even if there is no quality at all. This alone makes the hospital an important element of social design worth studying.

Another point to note is that the real world is a clear courtyard, and the online world is a clear square. In real life, interaction and acoustic principles allow us to speak with very few people at the same time. Everyone’s social life is very personal. Special work is required to give everyone the same content. The easiest plan to socialize online is to give everyone exactly the same information. Special work is required if you want to provide personalized content. It is interesting to observe the difference between the two media.

Conclusion?

Evaporative cooling is a fundamental dynamic of society and has long-term corrosive effects on the health of the community. This article only writes 1% of my thoughts on the evaporative cooling effect, but I have written 2000 words and I don't want to make a long story. People say that ideas are worthless, and execution is king.

Since I arrived in the valley, I have heard about nearly 100 ideas about social products in my chat. Half of the recommendations involve a form of meeting place, and 80% of the ideas will fail due to evaporative cooling effects. If you are designing a social product, it is very important to solve this problem first, otherwise, it will be dead.