YouTube is already Google's killer social network. Over a billion users a month.
- anyone can make a post (video, text, image, etc), either to an individual (instant messaging) or to a group (public or selected people)
- people can reply to other people's posts
- communities form automatically from the above two interactions
The only somewhat social interaction happens between the content creators, not between any user of the site. And those creators seem to care more about beefs and making money.
An individual (or organisation) can only maintain so may relationships. Dunbar's Number is a pretty good proxy. Ultimately, what each relationship is competing for is time, and that is a nonfungible resource. Ultimately, our relationships are defined largely by arity, the number of connections between parties and communications, the n:m relationships: 1:1, n:1, 1:m, n:m.
The vital groups I've been involved with have been 1) highly curated and 2) about 40--50 people, of whom maybe 10--20 were highly active. (One such group was a privat G+ community. Whilst it lasted it was excellent. I ultimately opted to kill it off due to concerns with the platform.)
A person, or a group, with more than a few hundred followers, can at best devote only a few minutes or seconds to each.
Over an 80 year life, the time you can devote to individual members of a group (assuming you sleep 8 hours/day) is roughly:
10: 5 years
100: 6 months
1,000: 20 days
10,000: 47 hours
100,000: 5 hours
1,000,000: 28 minutes
10 million: 3 minutes
100 million: 17 seconds
1 billion: 2 seconds
10 billion: 1/4 second
If we rely on a more realistic estimate of about 100 million actively-engaged profiles, that engagement increases considerably to ... 1 2/3 seconds.
In a parasocial relationship the fandom devotes a significant portion of its life to the star (often minutes or hours per day). The star ... cannot devote much time to individual fans.
The largest followings on G+ tended to be around the 10 million mark, allowing about 17 seconds of star attention per fan if the star devoted every waking hour to such relationships.
My more modest 2,000 or so followers might have received a days' attention from me, were I particularly obsessed with such engagement.
In practice, most of my engagement was with 20--100 or so people. Several of those I've continued to stay in touch with.
We seem to be under the delusion that technology allows us to scale intimacy. That's a fundamental impossibility, as true intimacy (measured in both time and distance) simply cannot be mediated. The problem isn't just the arity mentioned above, but context, expectations, understandings, intentions, and more. Intermediated communications quickly gets quite complex. Intimacy does not scale.
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/4bdf7470aa0301394c70002590d8e...
Not really. But parasocial comes more natural with scale. The main difference is the nature of relationship and communication. You can have a parasocial relationship even in a 1:1, and a social realtionship in a 1:billion.
The defining point is the type of power a relationship has. In parasocial it's one-sided, parasitic. While social is multisides, symbiotic. Though of course there is nor purely social or parasocial relationship in any group, there are some which are more like one or the other.
> A person, or a group, with more than a few hundred followers, can at best devote only a few minutes or seconds to each.
Social does not mean you must share personal connections with each individual. The crowd can also interact anonymous and indirect. The crowd can be social or parasocial, depending for whom they act and how much power it's head has.
No, it's not possible to have high-arity social relationships.