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".
