❧ Describe, in your own words

The people who most want to meet people are the people who the least number of people want to meet. The people who are the most desperate to date are those who the least number of people want to date. The people who are the most eager to talk are the ones who the least number of people are interested in hearing.

The Evaporative Cooling Effect… describes a particular phenomena of group dynamics. It occurs when the most high value contributors to a community realize that the community is no longer serving their needs any more and so therefore, leave. When that happens, it drops the general quality of the community down such that the next most high value contributors now find the community underwhelming. Each layer of disappearances slowly reduces the average quality of the group until such a point that you reach the people who are so unskilled-and-unaware of it that they’re unable to tell that they’re part of a mediocre group.

This is really rich food for thought and I’m looking forward to kicking this around in my head for awhile. My first realization is that—consciously or not—this is the phenomenon Dribbble is explicitly trying to avoid with its much-criticized, invite-only application process.

(BTW, I found this post on Quora, in Dan Saffer’s answer to a question about the future of IxDA.)

(Source: blog.bumblebeelabs.com)