Can Growth Destroy A Site?
Generate traffic. Reach critical mass. These are, without a doubt, the most important considerations of early-stage web startups today. But is growth good for everyone? Can a site grow to the extent that it ceases to be useful?
Some sites, certainly, only grow more useful as they expand. Most social networking sites, for example, need as many members as possible, to ensure that all of your friends can be found there.
On the other hand, I was browsing Seesmic earlier, and thought that it may encounter problems with growth. Seesmic is, in essence, a commenting system using video in place of text. This aspect of the business I don’t see in any danger of being damaged by growth, but the main site, a forum in which all comments are made by video, faces a less certain future.
While looking through the various threads, I noted that some of them have well over a hundred videos, the most popular having over two thousand. In this, I see a problem: there is no way I could join such a conversation, because it would take too long to catch up. The main problem is that video isn’t scannable. As the site grows, many, if not most, conversations will grow to have similarly large numbers of posts, and any visitor will be drowned in content, which I think will drive them away.
After considering this for a while, it occurred to me that I’ve seen a similar phenomenon before - the Twitter public timeline. While it was probably interesting when the site was small, there are now so many updates that it’s impossible to follow, so it tends to be ignored.
This led me to an interesting thought about social websites: content has to be fragmented in order to be useful. Popular sites these days receive such a lot of traffic that one can’t follow what everyone is doing, so they need to focus on a small subsection. With Twitter, this is your ‘following’ list. With Seesmic, video comments on blog posts.
Seesmic will continue to grow with their commenting system, but I think that their homepage will go the way of the Twitter public timeline, along with any other site which doesn’t provide an adequate breakup of information.
