Community doesn’t scale.

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.

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