Is small really beautiful?

I recently jumped into the discussion on the forvm (just how do you pronounce that, anyway?) on what sort of system there should be for selecting articles. In the course of that, Aurelius made a comment that he wants a system based on honor and trust, and therefore wants the site to stay small.

I didn't pick up on that at first, because the idea is so alien to my thinking. The problem with trust and honor is they don't scale well. He knows this, but instead of giving up on the idea, it seems he'd rather put the whole site on a bed of Procrustes just to keep the honor system.

I must disagree strongly with his priorities.

First off, keeping the site small defeats the the network effect. The bigger and more active a network is, the better it functions. The Internet is an ocean, of information, opinion, and, er, dross. A small, contained site would be more like a stagnant pond. Instead of a fruitful intellectual exchange, we'd have groupthink, clubbiness, tired old inside jokes. Some people like that. I have no idea why.

(Concerned about spammers and other time wasters? I think I have a solution to that which doesn't involve throttling the baby.)

In nature, as on the Internet, if something isn't growing, it's dying. Why? Think it over. Dying means a negative rate of growth. Neither growing nor dying means a zero rate of growth. Now the positive and negative take up nearly all of the range of real numbers, but zero is a mere dimensionless point. What are the odds of a rate of growth hitting zero by chance? Infinitesimal.

And as Kierkegaard has observed, the old tacitus.org site was slowly dying. That's the alternative to growth. Is that what we want?

Now, if you want to go about it deliberately, you might just come up with a scheme that artificially holds the site to a certain narrow size range. You have to go out of your way to make it happen, and even then it might not work. I can think of ways to try to do this, but I won't share them, because I don't think we should even want a small site.

Small is not beautiful. Small is just small. The network effect is what's beautiful.

Anyway, that's my take on it.


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