The Web - Signal to Noise - The Circle of Trust?

When I started blogging in spring 2002, there were about 60,000 of us. 60,000 is a very small town. Charlottetown on PEI has a catchment of about 60k. In effect we all knew everyone.  We all had to behave as we all do on PEI.

Now! - Hundreds of millions of people are using social software. It's a jungle out there. Not only is there a lot of very bad manners but also crime and vandalism. I am finding much of the web more like New York in the 1970's.

Not only is it risky but the amount of noise is blocking the signal. Here is Seth Godin on the matter:

For a decade, the web kept delivering an ever better signal to noise ratio to me. I was able to hear more things, more clearly, in less time. Websites and email and my RSS reader were bringing me signals from everywhere, and processing them (and creating, I hope, new signal) was a joy.

Lately, I’m feeling noise creep.

Lately, the noise seems to be increasing and the signal is fading in comparison. Too much spam, too many posts, too little insight leaking through. I don’t use Twitter, but I know a lot of Twitter users are feeling this. So are folks who go to too many conferences. And don’t get me started on victims of Blackberry cc: disease.

I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can’t. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem.

My answer is to keep my own community still in the bounds of magic numbers and limit my world to 150.

If you have 1,000 Twitter followers, 3,000 Facebook friends you are going to be not only overwhelmed but exposed to noise and vandals.

"I will lose touch with only 150 people in my world!" you might ask. But 150 to the power of 4 is a lot of people - it's 500 million people. I think that is enough for me.

This is my point that each "Friend" 'Follower" has their own world which gets added like a virus to yours. 1000 people to the power of 4 is a Trillion!!!!!

My bet is that the noise and the risk goes up exponentially with the number of people we allow into our circle. It's like sex and the risk of STD's. So here for fun are the key magic numbers taken to the power of 4 - assuming that each friend of mine has a close circle of 4 that I don't know. Let's see how the reach of this world scales:

• 8 - 4,096
• 15 - 50,000
• 35 - 1,500,000
• 80 - 40,000,000
• 150 - 500,000,000

I confess to be a bit stunned by these numbers. If I have a trusted group of 150 people, I can reach 500 million people.

At first glance I see a few things here.

Just because it is easy to add "friends" and "followers", your risk of noise, vandalism, crime and ennui expands into certainty as your close circle expands. There is only a small risk of missing things with a close group of 15!

Logically Trust must diminish also on a log scale as I expand my circle. So the power of your world is greatest with the smaller groups as well. So if you want to get something done, pay attention to your inner group - don't waste energy with groups larger than the 150 Dunbar number. The most power and the most support live in the 8 - 15 - 35 realms. Small potatoes for those who have thousands of friends and followers.

Imagine the web in 10 years? If you think it is a zoo now..... How we will get though the noise? How will we keep the vandals out of our world? How will we find things that we trust and that are important to us?

So how do I have a healthy life on the web? How do I want to have more support, more influence and less shit? The same way that we have to have a healthy life in the real world. We have to locate ourselves into communities that fit our biology. We have to protect and live in our "Circle of Trust".

Comments

[Natalie]

Hi Robert! I wholly agree about the noise. My own virtual community is much smaller than 150 (which sounds huge to me) and I would like to think that you're in it, even if we don't communicate that often. If I were suddenly to land on your patch of the planet, I feel that I'd be welcomed as a friend and I hope you know it's the same in my neck of the woods - well, the London 'woods' - anytime. I've just passed the five-year mark in Blaugustine and can't believe it's gone so fast.

[Tom Desrosier]

Interesting play on statistics, Rob.

As a writer of a blob, I can't say that I'm well read. The visitors to my site vary with the keywords used in my post.

As a reader/browser, I generally visit the same sites frequently and only wander beyond this "community" if I am looking for specific information.

I once read that many people do the same thing - visit only a few sites.

As for signal to noise... This is a great metaphor that describes the fodder on the web during a typical google search.

Good post as always.
Tom
http://www.dare2believe.com

[mattbg]

Dvorak had something interesting on this, too (as long as you will permit "interesting" to be subversive):

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2288738,00.asp

[Igor Waltritsch]

Interesting thoughts. In the 1999 in London some five persons died for informations over-processing. Limits is around the 20K of informations processed yearly. So think is very important to let our brain digest what we read, see and think.

Personally I would send all politicians, newswriters and managers in general to do some gardening monthly, instead of hearing yet more conferences and trainings.

[Connie Crosby]

One thing I like about the "new web" is that we have control over who we let in, whether it be via Twitter or Facebook, so that we can control the amount of noise we are letting in. We didn't have that same control years ago with the chat forums.

I have built up trust with about 3-4 different groups on twitter (some of which overlap), and each of which number between 40 and 75 people. I have added in some who those people trust, bringing me up to a good whopping number of people I follow. But, that has been very gradual (well over a year). I don't know absolutely everyone who I follow but can block them at any time if I find a problem. I like connecting to a range of people as a resource for questions and ideas.

Whatever approach you take, I agree it is good to be mindful of your network and who you let into it.

Best,
Connie Crosby