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Comment by vjk800 | Hacker News Reader

Human communities DO NOT SCALE, which is counter to the usual tech startup ethos. If you take a human community of 100 people and grow it to 1000 people, it's not the same community anymore.

I sometimes think about this also when people are hostile towards other people who want to limit city/neighbourhood growth via NIMBYism. If a city is somehow so nice that more people want to live there, it's not going to be the same city anymore after you double the population. People who are against building more housing in their neighbourhood have a point; they don't want whatever it is that they find likeable in their neighbourhood to be killed.

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This was the remarkable thing about Facebook. It felt like, and encouraged people to act like, it was only you and Dunbar's number of your friends. A 10^9 machine with a 10^2 interface.

That also explains the wounded anger from users whenever the mask slips or the abstraction leaks.

I'd like to add to this; I believe it's more based in the fear of the unknown. People are generally very resistant to change, good or bad, "better the devil you know" and so on.

That's why some people stay in abusive relationships, dysfunctional families and lousy corporations.

Sometimes resisting change in a community, a startup or organization is more a case of very strong risk-aversion than anything else.

Same with products, most people say that their favorite brand of a consumer product is what they're currently using, this is why telco's incentivizes switching carriers, because people stick around...

I forgot where I read about it, but there are some limits to certain human social groups we all share (paraphrasing from what I remember):

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Best friends: 2-3

Close Friends: 15-30

Friends / "Friends": 100-200

Acquaintances: 1000-2000

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Something along these lines. With the biggest kind of aha moment for me being that the army (notorious for optimizing everything to the highest degree) has organized itself in similarly sized groups:

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Squad

Section

Company

Brigade

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