Sam Liebeskind
@samliebeskind
product strategy at New_Public; previously community & growth @ Geneva
Sam Liebeskind
The Evaporative Cooling Effect - The Evaporative Cooling Effect is a term I learned from an excellent essay by Eliezer Yudowsky that describes a particular phenomena of group dynamics. It occurs when the most high value contributors to a community realize that the community is no longer serving their needs any more and so therefore, leave. When that happens, it drops the general quality of the community down such that the next most high value contributors now find the community underwhelming. Each layer of disappearances slowly reduces the average quality of the group until such a point that you reach the people who are so unskilled-and-unaware of it that they’re unable to tell that they’re part of a mediocre group.
For example, in one experiment, Stroud found that when comment sections on news sites replaced the “like” button with a “respect” button, users engaged with the content and each other in a less partisan way. In a few cases, the “respect” button led people to be more willing to click on comments expressing politics that differed from their own.
The thought experiment also shows how important it is for local organizers and businesses to find different idioms than “loneliness” for framing their social projects. “Solving loneliness” is like “solving mental health:” a fool’s errand. It’s counterproductive to think this way. In my experience, it is the positive content of a social group that... See more
