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

But the one absolute killer feature of warrens is that they allow your community to become almost perfectly scale free and grow like mad without ever sacrificing quality.

There are two fundamental patterns of social organization which I term “plaza” and “warrens”.

On the other hand, plazas only need to be started once and then they remain a hive of activity for new users to participate in from the first day.

Plazas and warrens both have their unique set of tradeoffs.

There is the possibility of moving into adjacent warrens but it’s difficult to explore far outside of your zone. Plazas grow by becoming larger, warrens grow by adding more warrens.

In the plaza design, there is a central plaza which is one contiguous space and every person’s interaction is seen by every other person.

Twitter is mostly a warren with the exception of trending topics which is the one plaza.

The Evaporative Cooling Effect describes the phenomenon that high value contributors leave a community because they cannot gain something from it, which leads to the decrease of the quality of the community.

These are the two fundamental patterns of social spaces.

Evaporative Cooling is a fundamental social dynamic and one that is corrosive to the long term health of communities.