SIZE IS IMPORTANT

Is there an optimal size for online communities?

Hans Dusink

The rapid advances in communication technologies have enhanced our ability to stay in touch with our family and friends over greater distances than ever before. Prior to these developments, communication was only possible on a one to one basis. As Clay Shirky pointed out the Internet provided a medium that could be used to address whole communities or audiences (Shirky, 2002b). This ability to connect with a near unlimited number of people has led to the question of optimal community size.

This paper will explore the question of optimal community size by looking at the work of anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar and then examining relationships within the communities of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), Facebook and Twitter.

Before going on it would be appropriate to explore the definition of a virtual community. In his book The Virtual Community, Rheingold defines virtual communities as “social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (1993, p. 6).

Mao, Vassileva and Grassman list the following characteristics of virtual communities:

• People have a shared goal, interest, need or activity, which is the primary reason for belonging to the community;
• People engage in repeated, active participation and often intense interactions, strong emotional ties and shared activities among participants;
• People have access to shared resources and policies determining the access to those resources;
• There is reciprocity of information, support, and services among members;
• There is a share context of social conventions, language, and protocols (2007, p. 178a).

Blanchard and Markus found that a “comprehensive definition of community has been difficult to construct”(2002, p. 3567). However, it would be reasonable to suggest that a community would as a minimum contain a feeling of belonging as well as shared goals and activities.

Evolutionary anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar seems to suggests that the right size for a community is 150. His article Co-evolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans explains the theory behind the number of people with whom we can have a meaningful relationship.

… there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained (Dunbar, 1993, p. 691-692).

In a recent interview with guardian.co.uk Dunbar explained:

I was working on the arcane question of why primates spend so much time grooming one another, and I tested another hypothesis – which says the reason why primates have big brains is because they live in complex social worlds. Because grooming is social, all these things ought to map together, so I started plotting brain size and group size and grooming time against one another. …..

It was about 3am, and I thought, hmm, what happens if you plug humans into this? And you get this number of 150. This looked implausibly small, given that we all live in cities now, but it turned out that this was the size of a typical community in hunter-gatherer societies. And the average village size in the Domesday Book is 150 (Krotoski, 2010).

In his speech at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in London Professor Dunbar went on to explain that the amount of time you invest in a relationship is correlated to the strength of that relationship. He explains that if you look at your relationships they are built up in layers. These layers are similar to the ripples on a pond caused by dropping a stone (Dunbar, 2010).  In The Social Brain Hypothesis he noted that these layers seemed to cluster tightly around a series of numbers (5,12,35,150,500 and 2000) (1998, p. 187). He surmised that these seemed to represent the degree of familiarity from most intimate to most tenuous (Dunbar, 1998).

This does seem to be an over simplification as it suggests that one size fits all. But Dunbar’s number was never about the number of people that you know, rather it is about the maximum number that you can actively “groom” (boyd, 2009). She explains that this means it is the “MAXIMUM number of people that a person could keep tabs with socially at an given time”(boyd, 2004).

The development of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter seem to be at odds with this premise. Facebook claims to connect in excess of 400 million people (Facebook, 2010), but this has been difficult to accurately verify. The best statistics available are for the United States from the Nielsen Company as at June 2009,which show in excess of 138 million users of Social network sites (The Nielsen Company, 2009).

This growth in social networks seems to suggest that individuals can have more than 150 friends. Anecdotally, we hear of people having 5000 or more friends, and recently it was reported that two celebrities were racing to see who could get one million followers first on Twitter (Hoffman, 2009).  Is it possible to actually know that many people?

The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook to analyse some numbers regarding the number of friends on individual Facebook networks. The number he came up with was 120 (The Economist, 2009). Most notable was that the number of people an individual frequently interacted with was actually quite small.

What Marlow found was that a person with the average of 120 friends in general only responds to seven of those friends. As the number of facebook friends increased to 500 the number of responses increased only slightly to 17 (The Economist, 2009).  This analysis corresponds with Wang and Wellman who found that in America, adults had an average of 10 friends to whom they spoke or met with at least once a week, as well as a few additional virtual friends and migratory friends (Wang & Wellman, 2010, p. 1162).

Thus the contacts on your Facebook page or even on your email contact list are not equivalent to the number of people you groom. These may include your closest friends, but it also includes people that you do not actively maintain.

One area where some answers to the issue of size can be found is in the Internet realm of gaming. MMORPG’s are computer role-playing games capable of supporting thousands of users simultaneously. The best known of these games seems to be World of Warcraft with a subscriber base of 11.5 million worldwide (Blizzard Entertainment, 2008). Much of this game is played at a team or guild level. These guilds are tight knit groups that join together on a regular basis to undertake quests or to socialise.

Guilds offer many benefits including free items, opportunities for groups, access to trade skill masters, quest items, and readily available trade skill ingredients through gathering guild members. You may discover that a guild greatly enhances your game play experience. You can meet friends, share adventures, and find people to protect you if you fight in faction versus faction combat. Typically, players in good guilds can go places and do things that players in poor guilds or no guild can’t (Blizzard Entertainment, n.d).

These guilds are virtual communities as they fulfill the definition as set out earlier. In his blog Life with Alacrity social software technologist Christopher Allen compiled some statistics regarding the group sizes within MMORPGs, which he discusses in relation to Dunbar. A detailed analysis of guild sizes from World of Warcraft and Ultima Online found that in all cases most of the groups were sized at 60 with a point of diminishing returns at 150 (Allen, 2004, 2005).

He hypothesises that the optimal group size for “active group members for creative and technical groups hovers somewhere between 25 – 80, but is best around 45 – 50”(Allen, 2004). The reason behind this relates to Dunbar. Allen goes on further to say  “anything more than this and the group has to spend too much time  “grooming” to keep group cohesion, rather than focusing on the reason that the groups exists in the first place. Anything less than this and you risk losing critical mass because you don’t have requisite variety” (Allen, 2005).

This is confirmed in the work by Williams, Ducheneaut, Xiong, Zhang, Yee and Nickell who found in their analysis of World of Warcraft that in general, smaller sized guilds tended to focus more on social bonds, whereas larger guilds focused more on game goals. This did not mean that the smaller guilds did not compete less avidly toward game goals and larger guilds were less social. What it displayed was that in larger groups strong individual social ties where more difficult to maintain as the focus became more game oriented. This follows a pattern established by Dunbar’s research (2006, p. 346).

PEW Internet & American Life Project also found a similar pattern when discussing Internet ties and relationship. They found that Americans have two types of connections in their social networks:

Core Ties: These are the people in Americans’ social networks with whom they have very close relationships…. This approach captures three key dimensions of relationship strength — emotional intimacy, contact, and the availability of social network capital.

Significant Ties: These are the people outside that ring of “core ties” …. They are the ones with whom Americans to a lesser extent discuss important matters, are in less frequent contact, and are less apt to seek help. …. Although significant ties are weaker than core ties, they are more than acquaintances, and they can become important players at times as people access their networks to get help or advice (Boase, Horrigan, Wellman, & Rainie, 2006).

Granovetter emphasised the importance of these weaker ties in job hunting (as cited in boyd, 2004). Weak ties such as acquaintances, are the loose ties that can provide information or opportunity but seldom emotional support. The weak ties can be extremely helpful by providing new perspectives that closer ties are unable to provide. This suggests that community size could be larger than the suggested 150 to enable a larger variation in ideas and assistance.

It has been commonly accepted that bigger is better, but as shown above this is not necessarily the case. Kollock and Smith point out that “the larger the group, the less it will further its common interests” (1994). They then identify several reasons why cooperation becomes more difficult. First, as the group becomes larger, as long as an individual’s action does not appreciably affect others, the temptation to freeload increases.  Second, in larger groups, anonymity becomes easier, and an individual can freeload without being noticed. Thirdly the costs of organising are likely to be high. It becomes more difficult to communicate and coordinate activities in order to provide collective goods and discourage freeloading (Kollock & Smith, 1994).

As communities become larger there is evidence that the sense of community evaporates as socialising does not scale. Science and technology writer Clive Thompson cited the example of Maureen Evans recently in the online magazine Wired.

Maureen Evans got into Twitter in 2006 and built up a following of 100 people. She enjoyed the conversational nature of the medium. In 2007, she began a project to tweet recipes condensed to 140 characters and quickly amassed 3000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town. Among the regulars, people knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew to 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to each other or even talking to Maureen. She indicated that “It became dead silence” (Thompson, 2010).

Clay Shirky says “ you can have a large community, but not a highly focused one; you can have a focused community, but not a large one; or you can reach a large number of people focused on a particular issue, but it won’t be a community”(Shirky, 2002a).

This paper has determined that within a community it is the relationships that are important. The work of Dunbar has shown that this optimal size is 150 but in reality, close relationships are much smaller as seen in an examination of Facebook statistics. We have also looked at an example from Twitter that establishes that a sense of community evaporates in larger communities, as socialising does not scale. As this paper argues, the actual size of the community is dependent on its purpose. The size of the community also plays a strong role in forming strong relationships within that community. Smaller sized communities work extremely well where there is a shared goal, such as in multiplayer games. Larger size communities are appropriate when there is no single shared goal, but there is a place to “hang out” required. Size is important, but the optimal size of a community is dependent on its main purpose.

REFERENCES

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Size is Important: Is there an optimal size for online communities? by Hans Dusink is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

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