[HN Gopher] The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Social Networks (2...
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The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Social Networks (2010)
Author : yamrzou
Score : 93 points
Date : 2025-01-04 21:53 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.cornell.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.cornell.edu)
| yamrzou wrote:
| Previous discussion:
|
| _The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Online Communities_ --
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665 (2010, 35 comments)
|
| https://archive.ph/q8DlQ
| pockmarked19 wrote:
| That's a different discussion, because this one has the added
| benefit of being from a cornell.edu domain! /s
|
| The submission here is also more of a discussion of that post,
| so this thread would be a discussion of a discussion, not
| direct comments on the article.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's worthwhile to link earlier _related_ discussions, and
| both the original article (now linkrotted) and a direct
| discussion of it satisfy that relation to me.
| finnh wrote:
| Doesn't this complaint assume a strict stack-ranking of
| contributors, where the "top" person has no reason to stay and
| thus leaves, and then the new top does the same, etc?
|
| Which is not at all how actual humans and relationships work. We
| each bring different value to the table, along multiple
| dimensions.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Which is not at all how actual humans and relationships
| work. We each bring different value to the table, along
| multiple dimensions._
|
| Sort of. In practice there are valuable and less valuable
| contributors.
|
| Plus all those multiple dimensions are not of equal value
| themselves.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A ranking need not have absolute certainty _of_ be fixed over
| time to be useful. We could well rank into _tiers_ of
| contributors or participants. I 'd generally suggest that such
| tiers would likely be roughly exponential, with tier n+1 having
| m^1 more members than tier n, but also a lower net value.
|
| (n and m are arbitrary, I'm not insisting on log base 10, and
| the natural log e might well be a better fit.)
|
| This is typical of almost all large network functions which
| exhibit power laws, Zipf functions, or the like.
|
| Measurement itself is difficult and subject to both cost and
| error, as well as variability over time.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| /of be fixed/s/of/or/
| numpad0 wrote:
| Isn't this model a bit outdated with prevalence of likes and
| retweets?
|
| Users on modern social platforms optimize output to maximize
| favorable responses, thereby gratification. There are not really
| ceilings, barrier to entry, or way around the system, so it's
| resistant to spams and manipulations.
|
| Classical BBS systems did have this problem. It was said that a
| community beegins with interesting people posting interesting
| topics, then uninteresting people joins to read interesting
| topics, and ends when uninteresting people starts posting
| uninteresting topics.
|
| What was missing was feedback signaling, and social media got
| past this at some point during 2010s.
| Groxx wrote:
| > _There are not really ceilings, barrier to entry, or way
| around the system, so it 's resistant to spams and
| manipulations._
|
| I feel like we must be using different internets. Spam and
| manipulation are _rampant_ on social networks lately, far
| beyond what they used to be, and while there aren 't really
| _barriers to entry_ there absolutely are barriers to _reach_ :
| you're not as widely followed as the spammers, your stuff will
| be drowned out.
|
| As evidence I offer: any cursory glance at Facebook or Twitter,
| both of which have likes and retweets.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > I feel like we must be using different internets.
|
| I can't shake off the thought that this statement might be
| more truthful than it deserves to be. Some of social media
| accounts are closer to what you have described, some are more
| like what I have. The Dead Internet Syndrome must be not
| spreading uniformly, but there must be significant disparity
| across fields and bubbles, deepening divides between common
| folks without clean freshwater supply and those privileged
| that has access to spam-immune input source.
|
| My Twitter timeline is... not great, not terrible. Reddit is
| out of question.
| Groxx wrote:
| There are pockets of Internet that are still great,
| definitely. But "likes and retweets" are long-time major
| features of basically all of the absolute biggest social
| sites in the world, and they're also some of the most awful
| ones that people keep looking for ways to leave. So no, I
| don't think it's particularly outdated. Predictive, if
| anything.
| rcpt wrote:
| Reddit you have control over your timeline. The comments
| can be good to. Just stick to your interests.
|
| Twitter turned into garbage when Elon decided to make it
| pay-to-play. Giving Blue Checks ranking boosts and extra
| power when they block others ruined every reply section. On
| any even vaguely political tweet you now have to scroll
| forever through a bunch of illustrated profile pics hurling
| insults before you can get to a real discussion.
| numpad0 wrote:
| No. Reddit has zero manipulation resistance. Votes aren't
| working, and its users are too prone to manipulations
| too. Tangentially and thankfully, current Internet
| manipulation frameworks appear to have been built for
| Reddit and its users; it sticks out elsewhere, and those
| malicious users at individual levels are easy to bump
| over edge for anyone with experience in other Internet
| communities.
|
| Twitter is o-kay. They seem to have largely gave up
| investments on African-Indian spammer program and it's on
| its way out. Gratification mechanisms outside of the
| feedback loop such as paid boosts and reward cash are
| clearly detrimental to creator performance, so they were
| destined to be filtered out. Pushing blue check contents
| is like pushing AI clips in style of Tarkovsky to TikTok
| junkies, it never works.
|
| I think Twitter users by this point as a collective
| consciousness must have learned that weaponizing
| Bluesky/Mastodon transition to trivialize corporate
| influence is a viable short term strategy, considering
| how slow and tame changes on the platform has lately
| been. Twitter had always had such mutually toxic and
| manipulative relationship between the company and its
| users.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| >Twitter turned into garbage when Elon decided to make it
| pay-to-play.
|
| Twitter has been garbage for a long time before that.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Aren't 'barriers to reach' pretty much necessary beyond a
| certain scale?
|
| Since a pure chronological feed would be unusable for anyone
| following more than a few dozen people.
|
| Or for anyone searching any terms more popular than the most
| obscure niches.
|
| So there has to be some system deciding winners and losers
| effectively.
| numpad0 wrote:
| GP's point is that organized spamming had defeated
| algorithms and contributing/consuming organic high quality
| contents is no longer viable. I think that depends.
| Groxx wrote:
| No longer viable for many / for new entrants on the
| majority of the social internet, which is facebook,
| twitter, etc other giga-sites. You can do it if you have
| other means to jump-start your followers (pre-existing
| popularity elsewhere, $$$$$ advertising, interaction-
| farming bots, etc), but they're all catering for
| celebrity accounts ("real" and manufactured, i.e.
| facebook spammers) and drowning out newbies because
| that's what drives giga-traffic and giga-advertising
| money.
|
| Nobody _likes_ that they are the biggest social internet
| sites, but they are unambiguously the biggest, by a very
| large margin, and they like to copy each other 's worst
| profitable parts.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This seems like a tautology, by definition most people do
| not have significant differentiating factors between
| them.
|
| Because only the most noteworthy fraction of the
| population are well... noteworthy.
|
| So the only reliable factors to boost the vast majority
| of the population way above their peers would be money,
| endorsements, etc...
| Groxx wrote:
| It being a difficulty in general in any multi-billion-
| person environment: seems very likely yes.
|
| It's not a tautology for a site to _bias_ for it though.
| That 's a decision.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How do you know for sure they are biased 'for it' instead
| of being roughly on the ball, reflecting the natural
| gradient?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Users on modern social platforms optimize output to maximize
| favorable responses_
|
| Questionable. If you're paid for engagement (directly or
| indirectly) there's strong economic incentives to bait and
| troll people.
| fallous wrote:
| Users "optimize output to maximize favorable responses" but
| favorable to whom? The social platforms define "favorable" as
| "maximizing attention/engagement" and incentivize accordingly,
| while users may have a different standard for "favorable." The
| prior can lead to perverse incentives and aberrant interactions
| between users.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Favorable to the poster, if we assume they are posting
| flamebait to get others enraged or to get more clout among
| followers.
| jwrallie wrote:
| You are assuming that what was interesting for the initial
| users is exactly the same that is interesting for the
| increasing mass of joining users, but as you increase the
| number of users, things that have mass appeal have more likes,
| retweets, etc. So an interesting but more niche post will
| potentially receive less average attention than before.
| Therefore, a niche community loses its defining qualities as
| the number of users increase.
|
| For advertisement purposes, total engagement triumphs, so this
| is perfectly fine and lucrative for the platform itself, but
| the quality is not necessarily maintained.
| Vampiero wrote:
| I ctrl+F'd "lowest common denominator" and found 0 results. I
| want to share this magnificent insight with the world.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Users on modern social platforms optimize output to maximize
| favorable responses, thereby gratification. There are not
| really ceilings, barrier to entry, or way around the system, so
| it's resistant to spams and manipulations.
|
| This is nonsense; there are people gaming the system
| _constantly_ who have to be actively fought. There are whole
| industries of gaming the feedback. And the feedback process
| itself distorts the content: it gave us "clickbait" and
| "youtube face".
|
| I've been watching evaporative cooling of Twitter happen since
| the takeover and my move to Bluesky, where new users appear in
| waves every time some new stupid feature is inflicted on the
| remaining Twitter users.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > This is nonsense; there are people gaming the system
| _constantly_ who have to be actively fought.
|
| Twitter has gone past that point years ago, possibly more
| than a decade ago. It's a warzone of drug resistant attention
| gamers and wannabes with cash to burn for as long as I
| remember. Maybe it wasn't as much as it is now during
| 2007-2008.
|
| IMO, clickbaits and even _wooow_ faces can be considered
| improvements so long that judgement criteria with presenters
| and audiences are aligned. Ragebaits are bad, open mouth
| brainrot thumbnails are disgusting, but a clear and content
| representative thumbnails would be good - the differences are
| not in levels of amplification relative to unmodified
| baseline, but in directions(is the "Inception braaam" bad? I
| love it and I think it's same thing as clickbaits.)
|
| Evaporative effect as laid out in the article is a situation
| where "players" of social media as a videogame exhausts
| motives to play it. The game must continuously supply
| dopamine release to creators, whether by rewarding ever
| sillier thumbnails stronger or more insightful comments
| better, to retain useful players for content supply to
| continue. Again IMO, Twitter had achieved a near steady state
| cycle of gratification and content drop by architectural
| design, careful userbase formation, and useful set-in-stone
| precedents, relatively resistant to sabotaging and/or
| manipulation.
|
| Is that entire thing a major net negative to this planet?
| Maybe. One could just say it and few would differ. It's
| supercharging scholarly experts across various fields and
| enabling invasive cultural pressures, so it seems neutral to
| positive to me.
| joshdavham wrote:
| This pretty much describes a lot of what I've experienced in
| online language learning communities. A large majority of my
| friends who eventually reached fluency in their target language
| ended up leaving or becoming significantly less active over time
| despite their success. Over time, the quantity of 'wannabe'
| language learners has generally increased and reduced the overall
| quality of the communities. I used to be completely anti-
| gatekeeping but my opinion has been slowly changing on this
| point.
|
| It is interesting that HN still seems to be very high quality
| (though I haven't been using it super duper long to truly judge).
| Does HN have any healthy gatekeeping mechanisms aside from its
| (ugly) UI to keep it high quality?
| hiatus wrote:
| > Does HN have any healthy gatekeeping mechanisms aside from
| its (ugly) UI to keep it high quality?
|
| Yes, the mods.
| manoweb wrote:
| I believe you are confusing "effective" with "ugly" There is
| only one thing that could improve HN interface, and that is an
| NNTP mirror feed, so you could use any NNTP client you like.
| istjohn wrote:
| I mean, the upvote buttons could be bigger on mobile.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Great comment. I almost downvoted it by mistake ;)
| kedarkhand wrote:
| There is a downvote button here??
| owebmaster wrote:
| only after you prove you fit in
| joshdavham wrote:
| > There is a downvote button here??
|
| Haha yes. You get access after getting a bunch of karma.
| yamrzou wrote:
| But it's that friction and all the other small details,
| that make HN what it is. There is value in permanence, and
| there is beauty in imperfection :)
| pjc50 wrote:
| HN being almost unusable on mobile is probably another kind
| of gatekeeping feature that has a slight positive effect on
| quality.
| xen0 wrote:
| I routinely read HN on my phone. I'm doing it right now.
|
| I think I've only accidentally flagged about posts by
| mistake...
| joshdavham wrote:
| > I believe you are confusing "effective" with "ugly"
|
| Oh no, I truly believe it's ugly.
| zanderwohl wrote:
| What makes it ugly? It's very functional, straightforward,
| and minimal. No huge padded tailwind components or
| anything.
| Vampiero wrote:
| > Does HN have any healthy gatekeeping mechanisms aside from
| its (ugly) UI to keep it high quality?
|
| Aside from the users being elitist egocentric pricks and the
| frontpage being indecipherable to anyone without a CS
| formation?
|
| I don't think so. But yeah the layout is mostly what does it.
| Before reddit redesigned itself, it wasn't so bad. Normies want
| Instagram-like feeds to endlessly scroll through, and they
| don't like reading because it hurts their brains. So they
| gatekeep themselves.
| manoweb wrote:
| This has happened on Usenet for a while, according to my
| experience, and for many years it has been an Eternal September
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September indeed. However,
| in the past few years, with many low quality users migrating to
| other places, and with a higher barrier to entry, good content
| has returned. I infer there are waves, cycles of evaporation and
| condensation.
| kelseydh wrote:
| Similar paper that's also fascinating, on why online communities
| grow more insular and rigid over time:
| https://researchers.westernsydney.edu.au/en/publications/com...
|
| Full paper:
| https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/7275/7129
| nthingtohide wrote:
| I have voiced this feature request many times.
|
| Why don't social networks provide recommendation profile
| transfer. Sort of like stepping into someone else's shoes. E.g. I
| would like to view how twitter looks like to Simon Willison. This
| would also make it easier for people to break through filter
| bubbles.
| wizzard0 wrote:
| Dreamwidth has this feature, agree it's awesome.
|
| Obviously you don't see private journals someone is reading,
| still a good way to discover new things.
|
| [username].dreamwidth.org/read
| shalmanese wrote:
| Hi,
|
| I'm the author of the original piece which was originally penned
| to warn Quora that their social software design seemed purposely
| designed to drive evaporative cooling. With the benefit of 15
| years of hindsight, Quora has thoroughly evaporatively cooled to
| an extent beyond even my imagining.
| eganist wrote:
| 1)
| https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumbl...
| since the original piece is timing out
|
| 2) shalmanese, how would you relate this back to platforms like
| Reddit that are driven both by community members as well as
| volunteer janitors?
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I think about this a lot- many of the online spaces I used to
| enjoy have been completely overrun by people that are a
| particular combination of mean, ignorant, and 100% sure their
| opinions on everything are objectively correct and final. Anyone
| not fitting into those 3 in the same way they do, quickly gets
| fed up and leaves.
|
| In particular, I am not sure why people are so mean online. I try
| to be kind to other people even if I disagree with them, but
| pretty much cannot find anyplace with other people that feel the
| same. I feel like it is infecting me, and I am not as kind to
| other people as I used to be or would like to be. I probably need
| to just stop talking to people online entirely for my own mental
| health, and contribute to the evaporative cooling of the entire
| internet.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _100% sure their opinions on everything are objectively
| correct and final_
|
| The internet isn't great for nuance. When commenting or
| communicating online, I've often tightened up my language for
| succinctness.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| The problem is that the world itself is just too complex that
| without nuance, you're not talking about anything meaningful-
| so what's the point?
|
| On HN this is particularly challenging because we get a mix
| of experts and non-experts (and people that have different
| levels of pedanticness) - so almost any possible statement is
| going to be attacked for both lacking nuance or being too
| detailed (and frequently both at the same time). However the
| people here are nicer, more open minded, and more accepting
| of nuance than most places online.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _problem is that the world itself is just too complex
| that without nuance, you 're not talking about anything
| meaningful- so what's the point?_
|
| To get someone to do something.
|
| There are very few corners of the internet conducive to
| debate. (Here is one of the exceptions.)
| bdangubic wrote:
| does this work? I find when I try the same to be "worse" in
| some sense, but perhaps I am not "doing it right" for the
| lack of better explanation...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Yes. Broadly speaking, in one:many messaging, speaking with
| conviction (and later qualifying) lands better than
| constant qualification.
| Lammy wrote:
| Voting/karma systems changed the nature of communication
| compared to traditional forums. Despite supposedly replying
| to each other, the participants become mere props for the
| real conversation which is between each participant alone and
| the larger crowd.
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