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myrmepropagandist

@aral

No. I will not think small. Absolutely not.

I could never be happy in a small social network. Not because I'm so wonderful and popular and everyone should listen to me, but rather small networks have fewer sub-groups.

200 people talking about math, but what about people talking about ants? 500? How much intersection? Large groups can contain more diverse subgroups. The stranger you are the bigger a network you will require.

3 comments
Doug Bostrom

@futurebird @aral

This reminds me of a fairly harrowing period in my life, rearranging schedule for a public radio station.

Modernizing our schedule (existentially mandatory) needed "horizontal block" programming. Individual scattered hours of "special" content made this impossible.

There was a "woman's music" hour, each week. Easily found, more easily avoided. A ghetto of sorts.

Integration and embrace of "woman's music" into the entire schedule advanced everybody's cause. More for all.

Tom 🍃

@futurebird @aral I think the two approaches are reconcilable. "Human subcultures are nested fractally" so we need social networks that mirror this structure. Little clubs inside bigger networks inside an enormous super-structure!

Victoria De Capua

@futurebird @aral big fish, small pond syndrome is heavy here. They think niche = special, small = order, and uniformity = peace. It's a recipe for extremely lazy groupthink.

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