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Notes -
This (1) post makes me think there should be research into a Dunbar's number for internet communities. Anyone know of interesting writing on the topic?
1 - https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/l8id4/did_digg_make_us_the_dumb_how_have_reddit/
Dunbar himself is still kicking, btw. Moreover, he's producing papers at an insane rate (number of Dunbar's articles about Dunbar's number). Here's the paper from 2016 on Facebook and Twitter, but they used rather old datasets -- 2009 and 2012 resp -- which reflected social media interface at that time.
Social brain hypothesis, which he's been studying, is about existence of several layers of contacts within any social communities. 150 is a size of one of the layers. After clustering social media data he found similar layered structure:
I read about this experiment from another author, who said similar results were obtained in online game communities. But he was rather skeptical, saying that the data is limited and there are many built-in artificial structures, forcing certain clusters. Those clusters might be stretched to fit the hypothesis.
Wow thanks for the link, had no idea that Dunbar was so prolific. This is interesting, I would definitely need to do some more reading before I could judge whether it was accurate.
I'm quite curious to see how online communities are different from physical communities. I wonder if VR will have a noticeable effect - I could see communities shrinking again due to the somewhat 'in-person' nature of VR.
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