Randall wrote:When social communities grow past a certain point (Dunbar’s Number?), they start to suck. Be they sororities or IRC channels, there’s a point where they get big enough that nobody knows everybody anymore. The community becomes overwhelmed with noise from various small cliques and floods of obnoxious people and the signal-to-noise ratio eventually drops to near-zero — no signal, just noise. This has happened to every channel I’ve been on that started small and slowly got big.
I followed the link to Dunbar's number and found it an intriguing concept.
wikipedia wrote:Dunbar's number, which is 150, represents a theorized cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships, the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person. ... t indicates the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships". Dunbar theorizes that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained."
(Has someone disabled url tags? I can't get them to work properly)
This offers a refreshing perspective on why the Keen community remains so cohesive while others like the Jazz community decay into n00bness.
If the number of a social group exceedes 150 that wouldn necesairy cause any problem. The group would just need a new social structure and a stricter hierachy to keep things working. You can see such structures excist in bigger communities.
The perfect solution is to divide this place into several Keen communities when that time comes, the first 150 members of this board to PCKF Alpha, next ones to PCKF Beta...
Anyways, I hadn't heard of this one. Interesting. But as Djaser said, more than 150 isn't necessarily a problem. But what kind of new structure would one make for a forum in such case... There's something to think about for future forum makers.
My newest mod - Commander Keen: Sunset: viewtopic.php?t=8568 | codename H.Y.E.N.A.
It's not really something that forummakers have any control over, unfortunately--the fandom for some things is going to vastly exceed 150 members, while remain low for others.
Part of what makes the Keen community so fantastic is, as Spleen articulated, we're well below Dunbar's number... we all know each other and more or less how we all relate to one another. :)
Interesting... the Keen community certainly is much more civil and pleasant than, say, the GameFAQs forums. Although I've noticed a certain degree of sort of insularity, or a bit of dislike for new members joining at times. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know...
The only new member I recall for whom that kind of dislike appeared was megakeen, and that was an...isolated case, to say the least.
But there is something to that Dunbar's number thing. Having a smaller number of people in a community makes it easier to interact with other people and allows one to feel more involved. I subscribe to some more expanisve forums and it's certainly very different.
megakeen ... was that the guy who made a post titled "GIFT" and it contained ascii art of teh bird, and something along the lines of "I am fed up with being treated like sh1t!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!"
elecdude33 wrote:Interesting... the Keen community certainly is much more civil and pleasant than, say, the GameFAQs forums. Although I've noticed a certain degree of sort of insularity, or a bit of dislike for new members joining at times. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know...
I don't know about the rest of you but I definitely don't like everyone in the world or even at the pckf.
Last edited by Djaser on Tue Jan 22, 2008 14:06, edited 1 time in total.
elecdude33 wrote:Interesting... the Keen community certainly is much more civil and pleasant than, say, the GameFAQs forums. Although I've noticed a certain degree of sort of insularity, or a bit of dislike for new members joining at times. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know...
I don't know about the rest of you but I definitely don't like everyone in the world or even at the pckf.
I'm not saying everyone here should like everyone in the world, what I've noticed (and I could well be wrong about it as I said) is a bit of dislike for the whole idea of new members joining...
