[rlucas]

One of the things the internet has been really great at is allowing those small (n~50) networks with high trust for e.g. identifying trusted vendors, but for really niche things where it’s hard to get an organic local network. Think new programming languages, or to crib from a recent HN topic, building tube headphone amps.

These kind of emergent niche communities can only exist when the broader network gets sufficient scale to have a critical mass in the niche.

So in limiting scale overall let’s take care not to throw out the baby etc.

[abathur]

I'm not sure I see hard top-down scale limits as a goal. I don't think this would be in the best interest of most people with a hand on the steering wheel of large social networks.

I'm imagining something more along the lines of: can we learn how to turn what small/niche networks do well into building blocks, and does that knowledge teach us anything we could use to (I guess adversarially) re-structure/reform some environments that are currently trust bonfires.