Facebook was once Literally Harvard. It's a great many things now, but one thing it is not any more is "Literally Harvard". It's now 3 billion+ people, few of whom attended said institution or anything comperable.

Suppose, as a thought experiment, you could create the ideal, perfect, social network or discussion board. Say, with 40 of the smartest, most creative, quirkiest, considerate people you knew. Hell: the 40 top exemplars of this on the whole planet. It would be a pretty awesome network.

(I know this because I accidentally created something like this, just by creating a small group with smart and interesting people in it. It really was surprisingly good.)

It can only get worse.

Because if you've already got the best, then anyone else you can add will be less smart, less creative, less quirky, less considerate, than who's already in the group.

And at some point you'll notice. Maybe at 50 people, or 500, or 5,000, or 50k, or 500k, or 5m, or ....

For a few reasons.

- Gradation of capabilities. These are ordinalities, not cardinalities.

- Limits to common experience and interest.

- Differences of opinion. Or morals. Or philosophy.

- Just plain scale.

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/1058991

And many new communities don't start out as highly-selective. There's something of a double-downward-wedge at play:

- If a community starts out selective and grows, it can only dilute the original cohort.

- If a community starts out antisocial, even slightly, it has a profound tendency to drive off the more pro-social members with time, what's been called "the evaporative cooling effect", or the Nazi at the Bar problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/https://blog.bumb...

https://web.archive.org/web/20101126001133/http://lesswrong....

https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...

The situation also appears with specific channels or publications. TLC was once the PBS-affiliated, NASA-sponsored The Learning Channel. H.L. Mencken's American Mercury was once a highly respected literary magazine. Both transformed tremendously. You're likely aware of TLC, the Mercury's story is probably less known today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury

There are communities that do remain reasonably coherent over time. Most of them are size-constrained, many cycle through members. Universities and colleges are classic examples of these. Most of their members, the undergraduates, remain with the institution for only a few years --- graduating in 4 or 5 typically, though many don't graduate (drop-out rates may approach 50%). Staff and faculty tend to remain longer, and provide institutional memory, though the institutions themselves provide some of that robustness as well.

There's much made of the failure of planned utopian communities, though it seems to me that the archetypal college town often strongly resembles one, and many of these have persisted for a century or more, which is longer than most other planned communes. (There are some exceptions in the latter case.)

Admissions standards, a highly-encouraged stay-a-while-then-move-on dynamic, a clearly articulable goal, viable economic support (in the case of higher-ed, a fair bit of that being direct or indirect governmental aid), and attention to the underlying needs of a community and institution, all seem to help.

As David Weinberger's noted, conversation doesn't scale very well.

And intimacy doesn't scale at all. Yet it seems to be what many social networks are trying to promise. Intimacy is virtually by definition the inverse of scale, and any attempt to try to scale it will end in tears.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/intimate

Yes, you can share a moment with a stranger. But if both of you move on, then it's just that one moment. And even in live performance, the relationship of audience to performer, no matter how strong, is parasocial, it's not a reciprocal relation (something both fans and stars eventually come to grapple with).

https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/4bdf7470aa0301394c7000...

So, no. You can have a small, selective, intimate, and focused community. Or you can have something else.

The question comes down to: which do you prefer?