Let us consider a community that interacts by direct person-to-person communication, by speech or by text, that has no explicit rules governing conduct, and relies basically on mutual trust and goodwill. Tufte, claims that the limit of direct democracy depends upon the communication channel capacity of the community involved. How large can a decision-making community become before social control mechanisms become draconian by necessity? In Which I Speculate Wildly from No Evidence Let’s examine this problem in general, taking as an axiom that social control mechanisms, including representative democracy, reddit moderation, etc., must get harsher and less nuanced as group size increases. You can’t even hear whoever is speaking at the time, and we’d all starve before everyone had their say. But try to apply the same freeform discussion method to feeding a football stadium with 100,000 people. Everyone can pretty easily give their opinion, and reach a consensus before you all get too hungry. Figuring out where to eat with your three friends is easy - it’s low-stakes, and there’s only a few people involved. I think that we’ve all experienced something like this. The quote above, from Cheaper by the Dozen (the book, not the movie), is from a woman with eleven siblings, explaining that their father had to implement some aspects of assembly-line parenting to get everyone out the door in the morning. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Cheaper by the Dozen Some regimentation was necessary to prevent bedlam. In other words, there are a ton of potential confounding factors.īut despite this, I think these graphs are suggestive of a real effect, and a strong one too - large communities are much worse at positive engagement with ideas, in my case, very silly ideas. The /r/moviedetails mod I communicated with (above) explicitly says that they check post history to remove “spammers,” so, it’s entirely possible that this graph is merely a graph of when I trigger an automated spam filter. Further, I tended to post my articles first in smaller subreddits that I actually liked, and only then in larger subreddits. In the majority of “large” subreddits, I only made one post, which is difficult to do statistics on. Let me play the null-hypothesis advocate. Posting on larger subreddits gives you less engagement per subscriber, even though far more people should see your post, and you also run a much larger risk of simply getting your post removed. I notice a pretty sharp increase in somewhere between 10^5 and 10^6 subscribers, with an inflection point at ~300,000. Įach dot in the following plot represents a subreddit community, plotted vs. So, if a post of mine has 5 “karma” (defined as upvotes - downvotes ) and 4 comments, the engagement for this post on /r/AncientEgyptian would be 5 + 10*4 = 45. For example, the Ancient Egyptian subreddit community has 4,800 subscribers at the time of this post. number of subreddit subscribers roughly measures the positive response to a post vs. Looking at the per-post, per-subscriber engagement, vs. additive figures of merit, and finding basically no difference in the conclusion, I chose:Įngagement = Upvotes - Downvotes + 10*Comments. Further, I’m going to stick with reddit’s convention and subtract downvotes from upvotes.Īfter some experimenting with multiplicative vs. It makes sense to me to weight a comment higher than an upvote in terms of engagement, as a comment represents more effort involved engaging with the post. Let’s combine upvotes, downvotes, and comments into a figure of merit I call “engagement.” Engagement with a post should meaningfully combine upvotes, downvotes and comments. Additionally, we can also see the fraction of posts to that subreddit that were removed by the moderators. community size (number of subscribers to community). The above plots show the “karma” (upvotes - downvotes) per post, and number of comments per post, vs.
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