Best takedown of the day: "The state of knowledge among people who have actually run large online communities is so far advanced beyond the research community that most research in this area is more amusing than helpful." The line comes from Michael Caulfield and he cites Clay Shirky on a pre-2011 truism about online community: "You have to find some way to protect your own users from scale... you can't try to make the system large by taking individual conversations and blowing them up like a balloon." This of course is what we were also trying to do when we shifted our MOOC users away from the centralized Moodle platform and into their own blogs and communities. And as Caulfield says, "This is discovered repeatedly throughout history, and you could write a taxonomy of different techniques we use to protect users from scale." Image: Waltman and van Eck, community detection (worth a read in its own right).
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