>Unlike forums, social media has an unlimited audience.
What does that even mean?
What does that even mean?
What I observed, loosely, was:
- There were far fewer very large communities than a strict log-log relation would have estimated, by a factor of roughly 3--10.
- Interactions per post seemed very loosely to peak at about 10,000 members. Given user attrition and various participation heuristics (e.g., the 90-9-1 rule), a 10,000 member community might be expected to have about 100 active members, and maybe 1,000 occasional participants, with the remainder nominally lurkers, and quite possibly entirely absent.
100 people is pretty close to the Dunbar Number, and would give an activity rate that would be sufficient to provide meaningful interactions but also a social cohesion.
I'd have had to look at the actual historyof these communities to see what trends and tendencies actually existed. I didn't, and the data are no longer available AFAIU. But what I did not, just from plotting activity against membership, was that there is such a thing as "too big".
It'd be interesting to see what the corresponding situation for FB is.
It’s provocative (s/o Blades of Glory/Jay Z and Kanye)
But in all seriousness, the audience of a forum is basically limited to the forum, because there are hurdles to sharing beyond most standard forums.
Most social media platforms however, encourage sharing and the networks are connected, so posts there have larger potential audiences and fewer barriers to go viral.
In my experience, most fora allow for guest/anonymous reading, and easy sharing of content via URL.
But social media platforms (esp. FB) tend to block - or make very inconvenient - guest/anonymous reading by putting content behind sign-up walls and nag screens. And then only enable frictionless sharing to previously-designated destinations, while hiding or obfuscating URLs for individual posts to make sharing outside the platform deliberately difficult.
General-access social media platforms reach 100s of millions to billions.
Forums ... tend to range in the 100s to 1,000s. Even on Reddit, the top subreddits are ~10m users, which is about two orders of magnitude less than FB.
"Greater potential reach" != "greater certain reach", and that's an important distinction.
HN sees roughly 100 submissions in a typical day (at least per the history page, https://news.ycombinator.com/front ... which excludes some flagged / dead items AFAIU). Facebook has on the order of five billion items submitted daily.
30 of those 100 submissions will be registered as "front page" for a given day, and quite probably a higher number will be on the front page for at least some portion of the day --- your odds of engagement with the general HN audience are quite high relative to FB.
The overwhelming majority of FB submissions probably die sight-unseen. My understanding is that a top daily submission lands somewhere in the 10--100m view range. Power law / Zipf distribution suggests that this falls proportionate to 1/rank of the post.
Any given item's visibility is highly variable and largely dependent on luck. That's also the case on HN, but the key difference is that whilst a top HN post might be seen by 10k -- 100k people, a top FB post might be seen by many millions to 100s of millions, potentially billions.
(Content can also jump between systems of course, and much FB content is links or screencaps from other platforms or sources.)
Yes, FB drops a registration-wall in front of its content, but roughly half the people using the Internet already have accounts. They do this because they can, and because the perceived gain (instilled switching costs, FOMO, etc., on their members) are perceived as greater than the access loss created by denying non-members access.
Researching G+ Groups, what I found was that groups which required moderator approval for members were on average 1/10 the size of whose which did not. Activity rates were also far lower. (There were also entirely closed groups, though these afforded virtually no insights.) So yes, if a network is not already large, throwing up a registration wall appears to severely curtail growth. But once it is large, that cost is likely fairly minimal.