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24748: Re: [MUD-Dev] Social Networks
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From: "Dave Rickey" <daver@mythicentertainment.com>
Newsgroups: nu.kanga.list.mud-dev
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 09:41:56 -0400
References: [1]
Organization: Kanga.Nu
From: "Koster, Raph" <rkoster@soe.sony.com>
> From: Dave Rickey
>> It may be that people are just naturally social creatures, and
>> that the main effect of T/H/N is indirect, it simply keeps the
>> *same* group of people together long enough to form the social
>> ties. It strikes me that pure chat spaces would create random
>> networks, not the clustered "scale free" networks that
>> characterize stable social fabrics.
> Humans are indeed naturally social creatures, in up to tribe-sized
> groups.
Not all of them, and not equally.
> Pure chat spaces create scale-free networks, not random ones. What
> determines the growth of a scale-free network is whether there are
> differences between nodes that make some nodes more "fit" than
> others. In the case of social networking, it's those people who
> are connectors, who have big Rolodexes. Not only do they tend to
> know more people, they also tend to acquire more friends.
Then why didn't Active Worlds do better? It was a pure chat space
with an unlimited capacity to shape the world. People could do
anything, talk to anyone, make anything, why wasn't that enough?
Maybe it was too much.
> Scale-free networks do have one notable weakness: if you take out
> the hub nodes, the entire network can collapse. This is clearly
> evidenced by all the anecdotes of guild leaders leaving and the
> entire guild collapsing.
True scale-free networks should never collapse from the removal of a
*single* hub, and even then they shouldn't shatter into their
component parts. We're missing something.
--Dave
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