Little Big World
There are a lot of factors which go in to making a successful social Web application. Keeping spammers at bay, ensuring a snappy response time for users, slaying the Fail Whale and so on.
However, one feature to a site that must exist as you become successful is the ability to make your large site feel small again.
What's your problem?
As a member of Yelp since 2005, I've seen first-hand the turnover of active membership - viewed here as people who participate on message boards, create and comment on events and consistently engage in communication features - as a site grows. I look at the active users on Yelp now as the 3rd generation. The first 2 broke off the site and some of them founded their own little communities, essentially retaining the culture they had developed for themselves on the site.
In each generational shift, you saw the same thing. As those outside of their culture joined the site, there is an initial snarkiness amongst the majority actives. Essentially, they are telling the noobs they better get in line with their culture, or they're going to give them a hard time at every turn. Eventually, enough noobs overwhelm the current size of the generation and the generation feels disenfranchised. They reminisce about how cool the Web site "used to be, before all these new people joined."
This concept will likely seem obvious to most people. In high school, sophomores think freshman are out of touch. The Baby Boomers think the X Generation has bad taste. Punk feels betrayed by post-punk, as seen the documentary Kill Your Idols.
My friend Chris and I were chatting the other night and he brought up something he had read in The Tipping Point, a book I've owned for 2 years but have read to actually read. He told me about The Rule of 150, which is the idea that at most 150 people can work together in harmony and be productive. While the book highlighted this in a professional, co-worker scenario, it's applicable to the online world as well. If I had to make an estimated guess at how large the active community was on Yelp, it was probably quite near 150 each time there was a fracture.
What's the solution?
How you make a site feel small again is naturally unique to each one. Flickr has Groups, for instance. The fundamental fact is you need the ability for your users to organize themselves. It's not enough to simply create your own organization and expect users to slot themselves into your structure. Because unless you have your finger on the pulse of each grouping you've created, you'll never know when or how to fracture them. Leverage the feelings of your users and give them the tools to self-organize.
Lastly, you shouldn't half-ass the tools for organizing. It's easy enough to create something you call "groups" that users create and join. However, if there's very little to do beyond join the group and state that you're a part of it, you've failed in your design. Each group needs to feel like they have all of the features of your site, but limited to a self-organized subset of members. Stop defection - go small once you've gone big.
posted by Ryan Gillespie
