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July 20, 2004
Curious eveness of comments at Mefi
Posted by Clay Shirky
Haughey has an odd graph of cumulative comments over time up on Metafilter, showing that after the first 100K comments, the come at almost exactly 100K additional comments every six months. Haughey notes the oddity:
During that time we had 9/11 happen, tons of new users, and then over a year and a half of no new users, yet the # of comments stays steady. […] That’s kind of freaky, maybe we’re hitting up against an information overload limit that no amount of new users or events can influence? Any ideas what could be holding us so steady over such changing times?
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1. Danyel Fisher on July 20, 2004 2:37 PM writes...
Roughly, this is the effect predicted by interaction-community theories. Look at Rafaeli and Jones' "What Do Virtual Tells Tell"
http://gsb.haifa.ac.il/~sheizaf/publications/tells.pdf
Essentially, in archaeology, there's a well-known curve that limits density against population: as a population grows higher, the density must decrease. Archaeological cities are less dense than hunter-gatherer camps.
So, too, the paper posits, we may see that effect in online systems: for a given user population, the amount of commentary is constrained. That's not too surprising: at some point, there's only so much stuff that one can read at once.
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