The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Social Network : Networks Course blog for INFO 2040/CS 2850/Econ 2040/SOC 2090

A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Pat... See more

On the deflation side, social networks can get less cool as more people join. The canonical example here is what happened to Facebook when parents started joining: all the young people left for Instagram and Snapchat. Social networks need to be analyzed based on more than their network effects... There are three axes for analyses: Social Capital, U... See more

One of the challenges with both community and top-tier education is that it’s really hard to scale. There’s something called “evaporative cooling,” which is when the quality of the people and interactions in a community decreases as more people join. On Deck has one of the most credible approaches to solving this challenge of any I’ve seen.