On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 11:16:01AM +0100, Ben Evans said: > [De jargonised version of (2): The more traffic there is on a group, the more > people will drop out. Under certain circumstances - probably most circumstances - > we can find out how many people are likely to drop out at certain traffic rates. > There might well be a maximum effective size for online groups, which we could > determine by measuring things. The downside is, in practice, online groups which > have been around for a while might always *be* at their optimal size]
This is something I've been looking at for some freelance consultancy work on mobile communities. There are 4 interlinked problems : 1) Not enough traffic means no momentum in the community and it tends to die out (c.f ::scr) 2) Too much traffic and people get swamped and kind of just zone out and skim read a lot of stuff. On a mobile device this swamping can happen very quickly. People also don't like paying to download content they're not going to read. 3) If you force people to stay on topic then you have problems with momentum. 4) If you don't then people might get narked about paying to download Arsenal gossip and getting Buffy spoilers. Plus it can act as an inhibitor to people joining - they get there, take one look and scarper (the corrollary is that people join, see no traffic in a couple of days and *then* scarper) Anyway, I'm in danger of rambling. Simon
