The 80/20 Rule of Small Social Media

Over the course of the next few months we’ll be treating this newsletter more like a Substack, sharing drafts from Chand and Ethan’s forthcoming book “A Field Guide to Social Media,” coming next year with MIT Press.

Do you have thoughts about this chapter? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.

The work of running a small social media platform is primarily social, rather than technical.

Unlike big platforms, which are largely differentiated by technical affordances and whose work mostly involves building and maintaining technical infrastructure, small platforms are largely differentiated by social factors and most of their work involves building and maintaining social infrastructure. This is what we call the 80/20 rule of small social media: 80% of the work is social and 20% of the work is technical (the percentages are rough and will vary—the relative relationship is the key). The 80/20 rule implies that people looking to build and run small social media should focus their resources on community building. Using big social media as a model, with its focus on technical infrastructure, is a recipe for failure. Technical work is still important for small social media and is often a bottleneck, but it plays a supporting role to the social work at the core of small platforms.

A good illustration of the 80/20 rule is popular chat and forum platforms like Discord and Reddit. They are home to thousands of discrete communities, each of which can be thought of as its own small platform, running on the same technology. Clearly, what differentiates Discord servers and subreddits is not their technology but the social infrastructure they offer.

So, what is small? We think it’s platforms that serve roughly a few dozen to a few thousand people. Essentially, anything that could conceivably be a group chat but that lives on its own platform. At that scale, running a platform is more like hosting a dinner party than building a rocket. The distinct and valuable thing you’re building isn’t a new technology, it’s a community. The central tasks are recruiting people to join the community and keeping them involved once they’ve joined. The former requires outreach and the latter requires social scaffolding, like facilitation and moderation.

See Chat, Forums, Local