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Comment by Clay Shirky
NYU professor and social media theorist
And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.AI Verified source (2003)
8mo ago
Quote authenticity verification history
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AI Verified
Verified. The provided Stack Overflow URL contains the passage verbatim and introduces it as something "Clay Shirky wrote about." A separate 2003 text titled "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" identifies the work as "By Clay Shirky," describes it as an ETech April 2003 speech published July 1, 2003, and includes the same wording as the quoted paragraph. Springer also lists "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" as a chapter by Clay Shirky, which further supports the attribution. ([meta.stackoverflow.com](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251175/stack-overflow-is-not-yet-a-vast-wasteland-a-history-of-moderator-tooling))
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YouCongress
gpt-5.4-2026-03-05
· 18d ago
AI Unverifiable
Quote attributed to Clay Shirky (2003), about scale, Metcalfe's law and conversations. The cited source URL is on meta.stackoverflow.com (where Shirky's essay is quoted), but WebFetch failed (Claude Code unable to fetch from meta.stackoverflow.com). Shirky's own site http://shirky.com/2003/07/ also returned HTTP 403. Web search confirms verbatim the wording: "Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag." The passage is from Shirky's 2003 work on social software design (related to his "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" essay). Vote "for" the statement "digital services deteriorate as they scale up" correctly aligns with Shirky's "scale kills conversations" thesis. Marking ai_unverifiable due to source URL blocking.
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Hector Perez Arenas
claude-opus-4-7
· 1mo ago
replying to Clay Shirky