
The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Online Communities - shalmanese
http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/
======
lionhearted
> After a while, you start to subscribe to what I call the Groucho Marx rule.
> You stop attending any event which would have you as a participant.

I ideally like to be the stupidest and least informed person in any room that
I'm in. At the very least, not the smartest. Continually looking for groups of
people that are challenging and stimulating to be around means very fast
learning and growth. But, I think most people prefer the opposite - they'd
rather be the star, or at least mostly on par with everyone else.

Admittedly, it's hard. I had a mentor of mine invite me on a cruise. Now,
that's the kind of frilly thing I'd never buy a ticket to on my own, but I
like being around good people. So, I went - and man, it's not fun being gently
corrected on how to hold a fork because I was out of touch with the etiquette.
Hold the fork upside down? What?

Embarrassing, but you gotta learn it somewhere if you run in crowds that care
about that sort of thing...

Don't get me wrong - I also like to help people, take time to answer
questions, be available for people who reach out, give back, pay it forwards.
But I think taking the attitude of trying to be the most humble, hard working,
and least gifted person among a group of people means very fast absorbing of
lessons, though admittedly at the expense of constant amounts of little
mistakes and embarrassments.

Edit: I should add - I think thoughtful new members are necessary to prevent
evaporative cooling - by introducing new points of view and asking questions
that people haven't thought about in a long time. Normally two very successful
members of a community won't have a discussion about the fundamentals, but
might really enjoy each other's points when talking to a third person asking
smart, good questions.

~~~
spitfire
<http://www.danford.net/boyd/destruction.htm>

A US fighter pilot formally proved this back in the 60's/70's. He eventually
went on to form a general theory for social systems (militaries, businesses,
etc) in dynamic environments.

The fundamental takeaway is without outside input, systems tend to increase
their entropy leading to collapse. You MUST have external inputs into any
system in order to keep it alive.

------
Eliezer
Besides the original evaporative cooling essay, see
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/>.

~~~
dkarl
That's an interesting essay and a good explanation of why it's toxic for any
group to defend their idiots, the idiots whom they tend to find on their side
of the issues. In politics, a lot of the ill will between liberals and
conservatives stems from each side's reluctance to disavow the kooks and
cranks on their own side. In a fragmented online community, members who
themselves make high-quality contributions may resist quality control measures
because they don't want their obnoxious idiot allies silenced. But that
results in them having to put up with the obnoxious idiot allies of their
rivals, which makes intelligent debate impossible and results in the high-
quality contributors leaving anyway.

------
barrkel
The same thing happened pretty quickly with stackoverflow.com. I wanted a way
to search for questions by users who had high reputation, simply as a way of
increasing the chances of finding interesting questions to answer.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it'll get implemented. I've long since
stopped visiting SO except for questions related to my areas of responsibility
in the company I work for's products.

~~~
il
Can't you use their API/data dump for this?

------
zacharycohn
I've seen this happening in several communities, namely some of the online
parkour forums. One in particular used to be a very tight nit group of people,
but as Parkour grew, more and more people got on the forum. As those original
"high quality" people left, I thought the next level of people "took over"
there positions.

This kind of kept happening, but every time it got worse and worse. It wasn't
until reading this article that I realized that they weren't "taking over" or
"stepping up," but they were simply the next highest level.

I've seen it happen and tried to warn people who manage those communities of
it.. usually with little success. Great article though, explains the concept
extremely well.

~~~
acabal
I think it's one thing to see it happening, and a totally different thing to
actually know how to fix it.

I run an online community and what this article describes has happened to me a
few times already, even with a karma/reputation system in place. I know I must
fix the problem, but I don't know _how_ right now.

Does anyone have specific suggestions on how to broadly lessen this kind of
problem?

~~~
shalmanese
I agree, it's not an easy thing to fix and there's no broad panceas or it
would already be fixed. I tried to put in some very broad level fixes in the
article but it's really something that needs to be figure out on a community
by community level and many communities are intrinsically designed so that it
can never be fixed.

------
Mz
I place a high value on treating all people with respect and making
information equally accessible to all, yet I am increasingly frustrated with
the outcomes that seems to get me. I find that a lot of forums have serious
problems rooted in the fact that one or two or a few people set the tone for
the entire forum and most folks line up to agree with one side and vehemently
disagree with the other. This does not allow for a free exchange of
information and ideas, which is something I also value highly. I tend to stand
against that clique-ish trend, which frequently puts me in hot water. Yet it
seems to me that the fact that I don't have a big ego and don't want to be
treated like top dog on some list drastically undermines my
credibility....but, I also think that the appearance of popularity I once had
on a few small lists was more facade than reality. Spin-off lists I started
never attracted more than a few members and my websites have never attracted
much traffic. I suspect that a vocal minority made me appear more popular than
I was.

This article is much food for thought for issues I have long wrestled with and
couldn't seem to get any good info on.

------
tokenadult
From the article: "In Academia, high school students have to fight to become
undergraduates. Undergraduates have to fight to become PhD candidates. PhD
candidates have to fight to become adjuncts. Adjuncts have to fight to become
tenured and tenured professors have to fight to become Dean. I can’t even
think of a single online community that bears even the slightest resemblance
to this sort of power structure."

Interesting point. Maybe having forms of recognition that are demonstrably
difficult to achieve does help outstanding contributors feel more like
staying.

~~~
_delirium
While I'm academic and more positive on it than some of the sentiment around
here is, that actually seems like one of the biggest _downsides_ of academia.
It at least partly selects for careerists/game-players/CV-padders over
experimenters/thinkers (doubly so for anyone whose goal is to become Dean).
Lots of smart people end up burning out or going elsewhere, and many of the
rest have a lot of their time taken up learning not-very-interesting things,
like how to negotiate the web of prestige, publication, and funding agencies
in their field. To the extent it works, I think it's despite all the
hierarchy, not because of it.

~~~
jacobolus
This is a good point. I generally like the “show us the code” method of social
proof in open source communities much more than the “show us your
certifications” method in academia. The problem of course is that the latter
is much easier to scale up, because the certification stands in for a close
and careful examination of each person... “Oh, he graduated from X school?
he’s probably alright” is much faster than “Let me spend a few hours reading a
major piece of work.”

It’s interesting to wonder whether how you’d go about building communities for
doing science in a way that had tasks for inexpert but hard-working/bright
newcomers to get started on, and allowed building reputation without all of
the hassles of degrees and academic politics where much of the effort is
misdirected. I wonder when/if some of the methods and norms of online
communities will begin to supplant those of academia as it is today.

Interestingly, when it was smaller, science used to be much more accessible in
this way. Once you were literate, you’d passed enough of a bar for serious
people to treat you with some respect, and all kinds of advances were made by
amateurs. So are the more open systems in computing just because of the youth
of the field, or does online communication allow amateurism to scale further
than it used to?

------
cullenking
I have been giving alot of thought towards this problem lately, and am
beginning to lean towards the rather undemocratic side of things. Meaning, not
all comments or story submissions on a site like HN are equal - some users
consistently hit the ball out of the park and some consistently say things
that should be be said. Karma systems based on upvotes obviously detect this,
however upvotes only apply to a specific comment/article, and don't follow an
actual user. How do you make that power user totally invested in your site?
Just rely on points? Make them a moderator? Flag "elite" member posts with a
different background color?

Perfect timing for this article, as I am about to launch a niche news
aggregator as side project. Trying to decide how best to handle the reputation
system...

~~~
ursablanco
You wouldn't be the first to twig to the idea that democracy is not the way to
achieve the best of something - but that's not its intent - its intent is to
provide some degree of fairness. And even then, it's willing to trade fairness
for everyone for merely a guarantee of fairness for a majority.

If you locate a reputation system that produces better quality or decently
filters better quality, please brag about it, I'm sure you'd have a success on
your hands.

------
cma
This is covered in _Micromotives and Macrobehavior_ , in a section dealing
with clubs/meetings/etc.

[http://www.amazon.com/Micromotives-Macrobehavior-Lectures-
Pu...](http://www.amazon.com/Micromotives-Macrobehavior-Lectures-Public-
Analysis/dp/0393090094)

A similar book focused solely on online phenomena would rock.

------
bluethunder
Very Interesting Stuff.

I can see the evaporative cooling happening in HN itself over the last year or
so.

Also, puts in perspective the correlation between the success of Yahoo Answers
and their reputation system.

------
johnglasgow
This article is very relevant to our company as we redesign our social product
to better achieve the network effect and reduce this exact issue. Thanks for
the great insights.

------
bincat
Another essay to read on the subject is "Attacked from Within"
<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000> .

I think the main reason is that communities grow only so big and then they
turn into a society. Users recognized in a community will lose their
recognition that evaporates into the mediocre society.

------
rdl
I think it is worth considering how this applies to Hacker News? Hacker News
is somewhat niche, although not particularly, and does not have particularly
arduous requirements for joining or participating. Aside from the leaderboard
and some informal recognition of really stellar contributors (pg, patio11,
...), it's a fairly flat system without rewards for status.

~~~
Dove
Not to worry. HN readers have high standards and wield their downvotes
_aggressively_. I've never seen such a well-maintained community as this one.

------
atari
Good post. Have been thinking a lot about influence and reputation lately, and
the relative nature of both of them.

Products that only cater to the Quora early adopter crowd won't ever make it
big, but ones that are able to siphon them off such that they feel like
they're special might.

------
stretchwithme
The key to interrupting this effect is to somehow give the most desirable
users a lot of influence and/or special status, perhaps being in a position to
decide whether other users are worthy of the same status.

