Other platforms like Facebook Groups, Twitter, or Discord, might feel faster, more lively, more engaging, and may work really well for small- to mid-sized communities. But they often break down once the community gets too big and the pace of conversation gets too fast, or when too many different communities spring up all around the same topic. The... 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.

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,... See more