Community

Community doesn't scale.

This small phrase is offered to those who are inclined to believe that the Internet provides a new way to form community among disparate individuals, linked via speedy communications tools like email, chat, blogs, wiki, etc. , and especially those who think that really big new "communities" can dispense with property rights, profit motives and traditional forms of ordering incentives and allocating resources.

Community doesn't scale.

For actual evidence of this, read Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu in Who Controls the Interent?, particularly the chapter describing how eBay's "community self-policing" ideal had to give way to old-fashioned law enforcement when the "community" got bigger. As quoted by Goldsmith and Wu, here's Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay:

The community really is no longer the way it was in the early days. My philosophy then was, let the community govern itself. That philosophy didn't really scale up. I would have wanted it to. But I realized in early 1998 that at a certain point, you have to say, well, there is a part of the community out there that isn't appropriate.

Why doesn't community scale? Perhaps because true community is hard work, requiring each member to give as much as receive, and that can really only be established among smaller groups, who meet face-to-face, and who engage in the hard work of forming real relationships. A good measure of the true size of any community is the number of members who actually contribute to the common weal. By that standard, Digg and other Internet "communities" don't fare very well, being made up 99% of takers and not givers. Indeed, it is telling that one of Digg's top contributors knew that another top contributor was on vacation and when he would return. Those guys are forming a relationship and have a chance at community, the other 99.7% of the "members" are not.

Community doesn't scale

The founders of the United States understood this, recognizing that the strength of the republic will come from not from large communal organization but from small groups, true communities, and even at the individual level. Once you get bigger than that, community alone won't keep things running -- you'll need things like laws, enforcement, property rights, credit reports -- stuff that works when people are essentially anonymous strangers to one another, stuff that scales. Indeed, even small groups on the Internet can fail quite easily to form community because it is so easy to simply turn off the computer and disappear when your turn to give back comes up.

For further ideas from Nick Carr about this, see here and here.

UPDATE: In a spot of self-aggrandizement and insecurity for which I apologize, I googled the phrase "community doesn't scale" to see if anyone had used it before, and found this "ancient" blog posting from 2000(!), available only in the cache, that used the phrase and understands the idea, albeit with more optimism that this post.