Another take on HS Hackers

Why does scale cause failure in Facebook groups?

On September 5th, 2013, heads of government from six continents gathered in Saint Petersburg for the 2013 G-20 summit. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, a High School Senior almost three thousand miles from where I type now created a Facebook group that has probably had a greater impact on my life.

He’s Avi Romanoff, hackathon enthusiast, amateur poet, and founder of the Facebook group HS Hackers. Now, after only nine months and 26 days, he is resigning from his position as admin of the group. He leaves us with a pretty sweet Medium article:

I’m certainly no George Washington, nor is being the administrator of a Facebook group a particularly powerful office, but I do firmly believe that HS Hackers should be run by HS Hackers for HS Hackers—once you graduate, it’s time to move aside and make way for the next generation.

wowowowow so bittersweet

In the article Avi writes of the changes HS Hackers underwent as it grew, and I can’t agree enough with the idea that HS Hackers formed a community of its own. As a newcomer, I’m acutely aware that this is more than just a pragmatic collection of high school students looking for hackathons, and instead a subculture complete with inside jokes, crackpots, and memes.

Not that I’m a fan. Ive only been a part of the group for a few months, and apparently haven’t had the time to develop rosy-coloured glasses. While HS Hackers may have been a practical tool for hackathon enthusiasts in the tri-state area when it was first founded, in my experience it has been little but a host for flame wars and irrelevant posts, despite several attempts to self-regulate.

Social networks are networks too.

My first real introduction to programming was a summer internship at Teuscher.:Lab. I wrote simulations to benchmark routing algorithms for complex or self-assembled networks on chip. The research involved significant background research, but perhaps the most important/influential/mind-blowing book I read was Linked by Albert-László Barabási. His argument: much of history has been determined by network dynamics. Interestingly (maybe appropriately, given the fanaticism that makes its way into posts), the clearest connection to HS Hackers is in Barabási’s description of the spread of Christianity.

Human society has small-world properties (don’t think Disney, think Kevin Bacon). Humans naturally form densely connected communities, with sparser social connections to other communities. Short shortest-paths between people are characteristic of this kind of network, which makes for the rapid movement of ideas, or the viral (even exponential) growth of this Facebook group.

That’s a simplification, I just don’t want to go down the rabbit-hole; you should start here.

Why is the Church of HS Hackers falling apart?

Ultimately, the way Facebook groups (and most social networks, for that matter) handle scale is inorganic.

I want to extend the reference to Catholicism a little more.

As the church spread, it remained scale-free. It’s like a fractal: each parish is itself a community, a group of which forms a community at a different scale (a diocese). These, in turn, form the same communities –– just at a different scale. This means that the community each person calls the “Catholic church” is a little bit different, grown organically in their local community to fit their communitys structure and needs.

This is pretty sweet if you consider the alternative. Imagine an überchurch in the Vatican where every catholic person in the world goes to punch their spiritual card once a week. Fighting over sermon assignments among the church officials. Meaning lost in translation. Messages that are irrelevant across cultural lines. No bueno.

Back to Facebook…

HS Hackers is an überchurch, whether it likes it or not. It started small, organizing a few dozen people in a certain region who shared a common interest. As the group scaled to its present 1,684 members from countries across the globe and varying levels of English proficiency, it never fragmented. Instead of joining a group that is well tailored to my needs and my interests, I ended up joining a group of quarreling egos and irrelevant arguments (no, I’m not going to the Yo hackathon in San Francisco, and no, I don’t plan on becoming a Swift developer anytime soon).

Its a problem of scale. Too many different people expect and fight for this group to be theirs.

Blame Zuck.

Ultimately the problem comes down to the structure of a Facebook “group” (and, to reiterate, most group-type functionality in social networks). A “group” has to scale because it doesn’t inherit the same organic dynamics that make social networks such a powerful tool for human connections. Whereas adding “friends” closely mirrors everyday in-person relationships, “groups” don’t give users a way to dynamically adapt and fragment to meet their needs while maintaining the association and central organizing that a big group (like the Catholic Church or HS Hackers) provides.

You’ve probably picked up on my frustration, but there are still a number of things I can learn from HS Hackers and from Avi Romanoff in particular.

• Pragmatism –– Avi saw a need (a way to publicize and organize hackathons for high school students) and created a solution (the Facebook group). I can complain about the shortcoming of the structure of social networks for ages. I should put a few hours to finding a solution.
• Initiative –– Just do it. It could be good, it could go terribly wrong, but as long as someone writes a Medium article about you you’re golden.

Have an idea? Want to implement an organic and scale-free social network? Email me. Ill probably have a go at it.

tl;dr: It’s not about adding members, it’s about helping members. Or at least it should be.

Credit: XKCD

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