Calhoun's Universe 25 mice experiments; overpopulation effects related to modern social themes

This is the third post in a row branching off the subject of tea, which I will get back to.  It has been nice mixing things up.

I've just ran across a really interesting summary of some social structure oriented experiments on mice by a researcher in the late 60s through the 70s, John Calhoun's rat and mice experiments related to the effects of overpopulation.

There's a lot to get through, and I have a number of comments on how I see it potentially relating to what we experience today, so I'll need to keep this moving.  I'll pass on a short summary of what I see as the overview, then cite a summary I ran across that offers a somewhat abbreviated and highly interpreted version, then comments on what doesn't seem right in that.  Then on to comments about how I see the mice and rat findings relating to current social trends, which play out in the most obvious fashion in social media use patterns and social groups.  

That topic outline:

1. overview of the experiments (focusing mainly on one set of findings)

2. summary article

3. likely errors in that summary

4. key findings overview

5. links to modern trends, especially related to social media trends and groups

6. final conclusions

1. Overview of the experiments

The "Universe 25" part relates to one experiment trial, obviously enough the 25th in a series.  The idea was to set up rat or mice "utopias," isolated living conditions where they had ample food, shelter, safety, and separated living areas to see what the forms or stages of their breeding and behavior would be, as their population naturally increased.  If I'm remembering correctly Calhoun anticipated a relatively high population would develop relatively quickly, about as fast as normal breeding timing allowed for, and the results didn't match that.  

I'll add links to two separate research papers by him, and one multiple-part video interview.  I would recommend that anyone who finds this theme as interesting as I do doesn't take my summary and conclusions as accurate, reviewing his take as well.  Some of what I've seen in summaries seems clearly wrong, and I'll speculate beyond what the original researcher concluded.  It may be hard to clearly identify that cut-off, even though I'll try to make it explicit.

It's hard to separate why he started doing this, what the original goals were, from later positioning and research direction, on to what he had already discovered and was looking to clarify.  In a sense what he initially expected doesn't matter, versus what he later found out through results.  Even his own interpretation is worth keeping separate from the actual findings details, noting what seems to be clearly identified facts (breeding population numbers, behavior patterns) from cause and effect sequences, why the rats and mice were doing what they were doing.  Earlier on he had been working with rats and changed that to mice, so by the time of "Universe 25" he was dealing with mice populations instead.

I won't go into the details of the experiment set-up, how the zones were constructed, what the animals were fed, how initial subjects were selected, and so on; all of that is in the summary papers.  It's probably as well to let that medium length summary cover the findings from this basic framing, and then correct errors (as I interpret them), and condense that down to a clear set of simple findings, to work with in extension to compare to human social trends.  

That last step of a comparison with people seems to have dropped out in review of this work back in the 70s and 80s, but that probably relates mostly to me only reading and citing some earlier content.  It would be easy to conclude that people and mice are two different things, and that these isolated and unusual circumstances just never would relate directly to actual human living conditions or behavior patterns.  

It's also worth noting that in a field I did actually study more, philosophy, entire directions and approaches were deemed unfruitful at different times, so that if you go back 45 years to read what philosophy was and how it was approached all of that would be unfamiliar.  It's a little strange seeing some of the same thing occur related to core texts that never really went away, like Plato or Kant's work, so that earlier interpretations just seem odd in comparison to the terms they later came to be defined in, and the conclusions.  

In a second video section of the one reference Calhoun anticipated that there was a window of time to apply these findings to develop human social sciences, and that the same patterns wouldn't occur in human societies until around the present time (2020; now), and not in the more extreme forms until around the time-frame of 2040.  He thought the damage would have been done by then, that overpopulation would have led to the negative changes seen in rats before that time, on the order of when there were 7-8 billion people alive, so now.  Why he thinks there is an earlier window for resolving root causes prior to the full impact of social crowding or overpopulation effects setting in becomes clear in the findings details; keep that connection in mind.

By Waldir - Own work, based on the data of File:Population curve.svg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9669828

That raises an interesting tangent; in that second video segment he is able to accurately predict human population change over the next 50 years, up until now, because he did that simple graphing in 1970 in that video reference.  It looked a lot like what I've just shown here, a log-log scale graph of time and population, with his mapped pattern shown as a straight line.

He also predicted that population control measures would have been implemented by the beginning of this century, or there would be a natural tendency for populations to stabilize, although he didn't anticipate that process would be relatively complete until there were around 9 billion people, in the 2040's time-frame.  So far all that seems right.  It might seem like all that is a completely different subject than what these rats went though, and that I never do get it to link together.  That's it, I won't; Calhoun's expectations of predicting future human society changes is really kind of a separate subject, an extension of what I'll consider.

The main core finding relates to the concept of "behavioral sink:"

"Behavioral sink" is a term invented by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe a collapse in behavior which can result from overcrowding.

2. Universe 25 summary article (Quora answer)

If this is a personal summary then this link is already a complete attribution, but more typically these are cut and pasted, and the real source is missing, which is even implied in the question framing.  Either way:

What is something that you read recently and is worth sharing

Read about The "Universe 25" experiment it is one of the most terrifying experiments in the history of science, which, through the behavior of a colony of mice, is an attempt by scientists to explain human societies. 

The idea of ​​"Universe 25" Came from the American scientist John Calhoun, who created an "ideal world" in which hundreds of mice would live and reproduce. More specifically, Calhoun built the so-called "Paradise of Mice", a specially designed space where rodents had Abundance of food and water, as well as a large living space. 

In the beginning, he placed four pairs of mice that in a short time began to reproduce, resulting in their population growing rapidly. However, after 315 days their reproduction began to decrease significantly. When the number of rodents reached 600, a hierarchy was formed between them and then the so-called "wretches" appeared. The larger rodents began to attack the group, with the result that many males begin to "collapse" psychologically. As a result, the females did not protect themselves and in turn became aggressive towards their young. As time went on, the females showed more and more aggressive behavior, isolation elements and lack of reproductive mood. There was a low birth rate and, at the same time, an increase in mortality in younger rodents. 

Then, a new class of male rodents appeared, the so-called "beautiful mice". They refused to mate with the females or to "fight" for their space. All they cared about was food and sleep. At one point, "beautiful males" and "isolated females" made up the majority of the population. As time went on, juvenile mortality reached 100% and reproduction reached zero. 

Among the endangered mice, homosexuality was observed and, at the same time, cannibalism increased, despite the fact that there was plenty of food. Two years after the start of the experiment, the last baby of the colony was born. By 1973, he had killed the last mouse in the Universe 25. John Calhoun repeated the same experiment 25 more times, and each time the result was the same.

Calhoun's scientific work has been used as a model for interpreting social collapse, and his research serves as a focal point for the study of urban sociology.

3. Likely errors in that summary

It's not bad, actually.  I'm interpreting these as errors, based on reading two of Calhoun's own papers, and other summaries and interpretations, and watching a video of two interviews of Calhoun, and one other interview summary (and I'll add the links at the end).

Errors / clarification:

1. 25 trials:  He didn't run 25 identical experiments, he kept changing the parameters, and kept finding similar trends.  Maybe he did run "universes" 25 through 50 using identical parameters but it seems more likely this is just an error.  He even changed the initial form from using rats to using mice.  It makes for an interesting context for it to have worked out exactly the same 25 tests in a row (here described as "running" 25 times after one complete test), but it still works if the findings kept repeating, but in different forms based on using different set-ups and contexts, which is how I understood it really did happen.

2. Ideal world / paradise:  it was a test for checking on how overpopulation worked out in a rodent test environment, so in a sense that was a "mouse paradise," but in another sense it was set up to run until failure.  Calhoun would've been surprised if the mice had developed some sort of ideal mouse-society structures and behaviors.  There was ample food, water, living space, restriction of external threats, and elimination of disease, to the extent possible, but of course it was going to get hellish eventually.

3. Steady state prior to decline, rodents attacking each other:  a number of distinct social roles came up, not just that of larger male dominant mice who attacked others.  I'll map out my understanding of the results in the next section but this requires that breakdown to serve as corrective commentary:

alpha male:  one role was that of dominant males, who would take over residence areas and only allow females to enter.  It could be clearer-seeming different in different citations--but males who had dropped intention of breeding may have been allowed in the same areas.  At any rate the main point of this simple summary is right, except that it doesn't frame this point as clearly as it might, that some males set up local zones they dominated individually.  Calhoun wasn't using the "alpha male" terminology; that seems to have evolved in common use later, or else he just didn't take it up.

females related to alpha male:  this didn't seem like some odd version of human polygamy, pair-bonding extending to a group, as in a Mormon society, but per one description something like this seems to have occurred.  Then most of the mice also lived grouped as crowded into common spaces, including both less dominant males and females.

males other than alpha males:  the dominance competition didn't end with some few males claiming territory; it continued in the form of ongoing fighting between other males.  The "winner" in these competitions wouldn't be completely consistent, although some male mice would more consistently lose or else drop out of this competition.   A concept of a "beta male" doesn't emerge, but two other forms of non-competitive males are described.  In the video interview Calhoun describes the stress levels of mice being tested and indicates that stress levels were very high for mice living in the crowded group areas.  I think this is a critical point, that the reactions of the mice all relate mostly to long term stress responses.

probers:  some male mice transitioned to performing relatively constant exploratory behavior, even though there really wasn't much for them to keep exploring.  This seemed to be described as a fall-back behavior related to continually losing the dominance competition.  

It could be completely unrelated but Jordan Peterson once described how in early experiments done on cats (which would now be regarded as unacceptably inhumane) parts of their brain could be removed, even most of them, and the cats could still function normally, for the most part, but would become hyper-exploratory.  It was as if the normal function of many higher order types of "reasoning" in cats led to restricting or tuning behavior in cats, in different ways, and without that processing the cats just kept looking around, as these mice did.  Attitudes towards animal testing seems to have changed a lot; none of these types of things would seem as acceptable now.

beautiful ones:  per my read on Calhoun's comments these included both males and females, not just males, as summarized in that Quora answer.  These mice are identified as socially non-competitive, not interacting with others in the same ways, only concerned with eating, sleeping, and grooming.  For whatever reason they hadn't been raised with normal social conditioning and normal behaviors, or else they chose to reject those.  Calhoun's description, from his 1962 paper:

Two other types of male emerged, both of which had resigned entirely from the struggle for dominance. They were, however, at exactly opposite poles as far as their levels of activity were concerned. The first were completely passive and moved through the community like somnambulists. They ignored all the other rats of both sexes, and all the other rats ignored them. Even when the females were in estrus, these passive animals made no advances to them. And only very rarely did other males attack them or approach them for any kind of play. To the casual observer the passive animals would have appeared to be the healthiest and most attractive members of the community. They were fat and sleek, and their fur showed none of the breaks and bare spots left by the fighting in which males usually engage. But their social disorientation was nearly complete. 

That clearly identifies the "beautiful ones" as a sub-type of males, but it seems like that's not how the behavior pattern is described elsewhere, although I could be drawing on other summaries that get that wrong.  Note that citations from the 1962 paper relate to rat behavior, not mice, tied to Calhoun's practice of using experiments based on rats earlier on then on mice later.  That second mouse type mentioned in the last citation was the "prober" group, already introduced, here described further:

Perhaps the strangest of all the types that emerged among the males was the group I have called the probers.  These animals, which always lived in the middle pens, took no part at all in the status struggle. Nevertheless, they were the most active of all the males in the experimental populations, and they persisted in their activity in spite of attacks by the dominant animals. In addition to being hyperactive, the probers were both hypersexual and homosexual, and in time many of them became cannibalistic.

Calhoun seems to link the degraded behavior patterns with females putting less emphasis on raising offspring, paying less attention to them.  In some cases female mice would even kill their offspring, or neglect them to the extent that the young mice died.  These social patterns, of social non-participation or other pathological tendencies, seemed to relate to these female parenting patterns affecting the next generations, brought on by changes in female mouse behavior.  It's not completely clear that this was mostly related to stress response.  The isolated females should have experienced less stress, intuitively, but since the mouse social patterns led to eventual extinction this couldn't have resulted in a stable set of responses.

Other factors brought up but not treated at length include infant mortality, a lack of breeding (failing to have any offspring), homosexuality (or something like that, related behaviors), and cannibalism.  I'll cover more about those in a next section summarizing results more clearly, again in the form of my own interpretation.

4. Key findings overview

What all this means relates to two separate levels of analysis:  the points I didn't describe yet (eg. why the mice committed cannibalism), and how to interpret these patterns.  

Calhoun takes one very large step beyond drawing experiment conclusions in the second video interview, extending what he identified as discovered application to human interactions, then projecting that onto a time-frame for when these types of experiences would apply more directly to people.  He never "pushes" that far enough to speculate those specific forms, how human societies or individual behaviors would fail in the same ways, at least in that video.  For example, he doesn't guess if cannibalism will occur among people in greater numbers, or homosexuality, or predict how the dominant male to group of related females breeding pattern would be enacted, since humans could never experience directly parallel circumstances.

Let's start with the granular description first, how those other details seem to fit in with the rest, then move on more to interpretation after that.

cannibalism / homosexual behavior:  these Calhoun seems to interpret as related as behavioral anomalies, not so different than the continual exploration / "probing" behavior.  It seems to be how the mice react to high-stress conditions that shatter their normal social role patterns.  Aggressive behavior also relates; the descriptions of mice continually fighting ties to these others.  A comment in a Quora discussion claimed that Calhoun was really trying to link homosexuality with crowding and psychological stress, but in at least the two papers and two short video interviews he really doesn't expand on that topic at all.  No doubt other commentary and interpretation by others has added more to that discussion, and it's possible Calhoun addresses it further in other material.  

Of course the mice aren't pursuing homosexual, pair-bonded relationships, they are only mimicking the sex act with other male mice.  In common understanding this could relate to dominance demonstration (although obviously I'm not trained in psychology, so I'm not trying to pass on a developed interpretation).  Per the short references it didn't seem to be tied to that, just to abnormal behavior instead, as the fighting not related to sexual selection dominance was, or the mice and rats biting each others' tails without clear purpose.  From the context of Calhoun's comments it didn't even seem like the mice were necessarily seeking sexual gratification, as if they could just be behaving somewhat erratically for parting ways with pre-conditioned social responses so drastically.

Calhoun's own related description from the 1962 paper is interesting:

Below the dominant males both on the status scale and in their level of activity were the homosexuals-a group perhaps better described as pan sexual.  These animals apparently could not discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate sex partners. They made sexual advances to males, juveniles and females that were not in estrus. The males, including the dominants as well as the others of the pansexuals' own group, usually accepted their attentions. The general level of activity of these animals was only moderate. They were frequently attacked by their dominant associates, but they very rarely contended for status. 

Cannibalism wasn't explained or expanded on either.  It seems implied that both young mice and adults were killed and eaten, related to stress response, but without a more complete analysis or without more background that pattern isn't clear.

die-off:  this seems to relate to mice losing social conditioning to fulfill normal roles, with that new set of mice lacking that conditioning simply stopping breeding.  Calhoun defines the transition in terms of a "first death" when successful, normal social conditioning stopped, in terms of that step leading to death, and also the more metaphorical death of the mouse culture (or end of successful social conditioning patterns, if one would rather).  It's odd that this could occur so completely that the mouse colonies would completely cease to exist, but that's an interesting and disturbing part of the study findings, that they are counter-intuitive.

This is why Calhoun interprets these findings as being so dire, in relation to drawing a parallel with human societies.  He doesn't just see these patterns as indicating unhealthy trends that may repeat among people, but as representing the potential downfall of human societies as a whole.  It would take time, and would occur over some stages, as it did with the mice.  Even if it would never relate to this final level (extinction) the earlier negative patterns aren't as reversible as they might seem, at least in the case of the mice.  

Intuitively the alpha males and related females should have been able to set up a new mouse behavior paradigm that could repeat over the long term, but that's not what they observed.  This interim steady-state context was only stable over the short term, with some degree of further decline built into those conditions, at least within the context of that experiment.

lessons learned:  really I didn't get far with this part, even though it's really the likely crux.  Calhoun mentioned that in other experiments it was possible to set up a similar context, along with learned-response reward systems, to build in goals and evolving positive response cycles for the mice, and avoid the negative conditions and final terminal end state.  Those lessons and conditions may really fall too far from human experience to be as useful, or that really could relate to the entire experiment structure.  

If humans could be confined to a limited space, with limited outlets, for example in an underground city space, some of this context and the findings may apply more directly.  Even then people are more self-aware than mice or rats, with the potential to set up more shared boundaries, roles, and restrictions, and may be able to avoid some of the same endpoint states, even under the most identical conditions imaginable.  It would be interesting to compare these results to studies of social behavior patterns among long term prison inmate populations, to see if there really would be any carry-over.  It seems a stretch, as if the parallel would be more complete observed over human lifetimes, versus decades, with prison population turn-over renewing social expectations and perspectives too much to replicate these negative transitions.

interpretation and criticism of Calhoun's work:  Edmund Ramsden & Jon Adams wrote a good 2008 summary of the experiments, specific findings, conclusion interpretations, and later acceptance and rejection of these ideas and methodology in Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence.  

The point here is to consider these ideas, and then interpret other later isolated but related patterns in human societies as potentially similar or not.  It's a different kind of thing to speculate about how patterns found in rodent social experiments might inform us of human society behavior.  It might seem like I've just contradicted myself, but as I see it the two themes can stay separate.  We can look for and consider underlying human society patterns that superficially mirror these study results, without ever expecting the studies to necessarily predict or relate to the other human conditions.  Partial parallels could be interesting and informative, even without expecting underlying causal connections.

It would be interesting if the forms of societal decay Calhoun expected happen next, or if that's what we are actually witnessing now.  As I've interpreted the little I've ran across he saw his own work as a starting point, not a detailed model, and definitely not predictive in that sense.  That's in spite of him anticipating that population growth would become a problem on a sociological level, as it was experienced individually through impact to social forms, not just in terms of resource depletion or scarcity.

In a Smithstonian Magazine reference a slight variation in interpretation is mentioned:

Now, interpretations of Calhoun’s work has changed. Inglis-Arkell explains that the habitats he created weren’t really overcrowded, but that isolation enabled aggressive mice to stake out territory and isolate the beautiful ones. She writes, "Instead of a population problem, one could argue that Universe 25 had a fair distribution problem."

At least at that level of detail this doesn't seem to add much.  The mice had more space than they needed, and unlimited food, so the limitation was on social relationships, between individuals competing for dominance.  It's odd framing access to female breeding partners as a "distribution problem," although I guess in some sense that might work.

I think it helps to keep the timeline in mind.  I've cited Calhoun's published work in two forms from 1962 and 1973, with a video reference from 1970 (all in a references section following).  The IBM PC was introduced in 1981, and the world wide web (file-type conventions) formally created around 1991, so Calhoun wasn't able to factor in the source of the main changes we've experienced in the last 40 years.  The following section doesn't do that either, but it does raise some related social changes that at least superficially resemble his mice behavior patterns. 

5. Links to modern trends, including social media groups and trends

This would also have to seem a stretch, and the ideas in this section will be quite speculative, but hear me out.  The idea here is to consider to what extent patterns in modern societies or social groupings may already replicate some of these isolated-mouse-society patterns, and why.  Obviously I'm not suggesting that human societies are falling apart in the same ways that these experiments predicted.  The idea is to consider some related effects, without the causes necessarily being similar.

incels (involuntary celibates):  obviously just summarizing this pattern or social group as either of those, a pattern or a social group, will be too problematic to fully justify, but there is an obvious clear parallel here.  I'll use a Wikipedia summary to cover that background faster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incel

Incels (/ˈɪnsɛlz/ IN-selz), a portmanteau of "involuntary celibates", are members of an online subculture who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. Discussions in incel forums are often characterized by resentment, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, and the endorsement of violence against sexually active people. 

The American nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described the subculture as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups. Incels are mostly male and heterosexual, and many sources report that incels are predominantly white. Estimates of the overall size of the subculture vary greatly, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands.

At least six mass murders, resulting in a total of 44 deaths, have been committed since 2014 by men who have either self-identified as incels or who had mentioned incel-related names and writings in their private writings or Internet postings. Incel communities have been criticized by the media and researchers for being misogynistic, encouraging violence, spreading extremist views, and radicalizing their members...

So really two aspects seem to carry over:  the theme of some males (mostly males) representing themselves as not being able to successfully pair bond or mate with females, and resulting violence.  With "only" six mass murders being referenced one might wonder if that's a higher than average case proportion in the US (it surely is; the point here is that mass murder should be more of an anomaly than it actually is).  

It's not clear what causes this, why that pattern shows up as something a group of people all experience, but a sub-theme relates to an odd description of the context and potential causes:

The "black pill" generally refers to a set of commonly-held beliefs in incel communities, which include biological determinism, fatalism, and defeatism for unattractive people... as "a profoundly sexist ideology that ... amounts to a fundamental rejection of women's sexual emancipation, labeling women shallow, cruel creatures who will choose only the most attractive men if given the choice." 

...a belief that the entire social system was broken and that one's place in the system was not something any individual could change. An incel who has "taken the black pill" has adopted the belief that they are hopeless, and that their lack of success romantically and sexually is permanent regardless of any changes they might try to make to their physical appearance, personality, or other characteristics.

A bit extreme, right?  One part stands out to me, describing women as "choos[ing] only the most attractive men if given the choice."  There's no way to successfully do it, but that needs to be unpacked, to determine why that's not just a natural outcome, and why it relates to a problem of this importance in this context.  The higher level description is interesting, that "the entire social system was broken."

On to the guessing part, but first one more observation that links to that.  A online contact (/ friend; that boundary is hard to pin down) mentioned trying out dating apps (programs) and not being successful, not doing much dating as a result.  Someone else commented in that Facebook discussion--this was all being hashed out in an open forum--that per their experience the most attractive few men and women tend to choose each other and meet through dating apps, and the majority who aren't as attractive also choose those potential partners and then aren't selected.  That implies a lot more for sweeping general patterns than I intend, but how that could and probably does work, to some degree, is obvious enough.

Next one would wonder about the expected normal, conventional pattern of people of all different levels of being "naturally attractive"--possessing symmetrical features, clear skin, athletic appearance, lack of noticeable negative features, etc.--pairing based on shared interests, and acceptance that their partner doesn't need to look like a model or movie star.  Intuitively that should happen, and to some extent it must.

One factor or driver that might well "throw a spanner into the works" could be social status and income level related to males.  Men would tend to over-emphasize appearance, per my experience as a male, and general perception, but women would factor in a broader set of concerns, including appearance and these other two concerns.  It's not unheard of for people to describe themselves as "sapio-sexual," valuing intelligence, and other shared interests could always factor in (reading preference, passtimes, social groupings, personal interests, liking tea).  

But if we can assume that physical attractiveness and social status, largely linked to income, might be over-riding factors for females judging males then that could leave a significant majority of males out.  Many might see only the second half as open to being changed, their status, and even that might not be easy.  Of course weight issues and such can be addressed, or personal style concerns.  Sloppy clothing styles, poor grooming, poor posture, or even wearing a fedora might limit males' visual appeal.

Let's consider one or two alpha-male cases that might help place this, if only to a limited degree.  In the realm of Instagram influencers Dan Bilzerian is famous for putting out an image of himself as being surrounded by beautiful women who accompany him (an ex-military guy known for physique, attractiveness, cultivating image through gun ownership, and playing poker).  That's probably about as close as we could get to the alpha-male Universe 25 direct mapping.  Of course some of that is just image; he probably earns significant income from leveraging that social media persona, so to some degree that's also a business branding issue.  Then there are Hollywood stars who date many young women, a pattern that would repeat in more conventional forms.  Those women date multiple successful men too, no doubt, so the parallel isn't as clearly formed.

In both these extreme and relatively unconventional examples the paradigm of attractive men and multiple women partnering gets extended.  We're not seeing how people across a broader spectrum are in any way blocked from dating or finding a long term mate by this.  Only the mouse-society case of a significant number of dominant males maintaining multiple partners--both the very successful "alphas" and the temporarily successful mixed population mice--seems to set up this set of circumstances.

There are two ways this same selection paradigm could result in the involuntarily single-male outcome (here still on the human case):

1.  females are also involuntarily single, or at least voluntarily so.  This seems most likely, since the other outcome seems a stretch, extensive polygamy occurring.

2. some males are either dating multiple women or serial dating to a degree that throws off the equitable pairing conclusion.  Maybe this happens, but given that all this is a tangent to a tangent I should really let this drop at this point.  I'll move on to considering another related societal pattern.

incel caricatures: 

I won't spend too much time on this but it is interesting, how evolved these images and stereotypes become in online discussions.

the successful male is ridiculed more because self-identifying incels draw these images

What Does 'Chad' Mean? The Odd Way Incel Men On Reddit And 4Chan Use It To Describe Certain Guys

According to Incel Wiki, "A chad is someone who can elicit near universal positive female sexual attention at will. A chad tends to be between an '8' to a '10' on the decile scale, has an extremely high income and/or an extreme amount of social status. A sexually active chad has sex with a wide variety of women, and has exclusive access to Stacy...

The stereotype evolves, only partly as a joke, with the standard description for an "incel" tied to the typical understanding:

The people in these "incel" circles are portraying the "alphas" negatively on purpose, and also really do identify with the cartoon-like incel character, but the joking around shifts the intentions and forms.

image credit:  Incels Categorize Women by Personal Style and Attractiveness

The female parallel is interesting because again there is an intention to make fun of the most attractive females, but the less appealing, plainer "Becky" image is also portrayed as attractive (or probably more so than the "higher" feminine ideal, for seeming like a real person).  It's important context that the people identifying as incels aren't dating or sleeping with those plainer-image women either, which helps explain why they are also being derided.

What about actually unattractive women, the more direct female equivalent?  I'm just speculating, but it seems like women who are seen as below average in attractiveness are generally just disregarded.  But why?  It's a stretch to guess that over-exposure to physically attractive women as paradigms make them seem even less desirable, but I suppose there could be something to that.

But maybe it's not that.  Maybe for whatever other reasons these males never acquire the social skills necessary to date any female, regardless of how they match up.  Disregarding the women that they actually could date, but don't, could help externalize the problems as not based within their own shortcomings. 

It's important to consider why this paradigm is so heavily tipped towards males initiating any relationship development.  Per my understanding reality really is set up this way, with males initiating most related social contact and women playing the role of approving or rejecting advances.  Of course that's too broad a claim for me to develop or support, even though I experienced it over decades and many relationships.  Maybe what I experienced really included a more subtle first step, a signal to initiate the process first started by women, and I was dull enough to often miss that.  Flirting would relate to both genders, and who knows what I really went through when I was most involved in exploration in my 20s.

I'll mention a video link in which Jordan Peterson describes his take on how that works, how the selection process between males and females is structured (which is really worth watching, even if you completely reject all that content, and Jordan Peterson's ideas in general).   Another video addresses his take on why some men fail at dating.

Bear in mind that although he is a psychologist many of his ideas are controversial.  For sure he is describing some well established basics of how men and women interact in mate selection, and then adding some of his own interpretation about modern forms of patterns that are much more speculative.

In all that "incel culture" discussion it's easy to overlook that the female experience isn't really addressed, beyond blaming women for making partner choices in sweeping generalized forms.  I'm not headed anywhere with that direction, just pointing out the obvious.

childlessness by choice:  the obvious example for this pattern also relating to people seems to relate to Japanese society as a whole.  Rather than summarize that from personal knowledge I'll cite the first related article turned up by Google search:

Japan's Births Decline To Lowest Number On Record (NPR, December 2019)

The country's health ministry announced Tuesday that the number of babies born in 2019 fell by an estimated 5.9% this year, to 864,000. It's the first time since 1899, when the government began tracking the data, that the number has dipped below 900,000, according to The Asahi Shimbun....

What accounts for the steep drop in births? The health ministry points to the declining numbers of people of reproductive age, as the offspring of baby boomers get older.

That joins other factors — namely the immense burden shouldered by Japanese women to do housework and child care by themselves, and a culture that makes it difficult to both have a job outside the home and be a mother. Younger generations of Japanese women have increasingly opted to continue working, rather than get married, have children and give up their careers...

...Marriage rates in Japan have halved since the early 1970s, and birth rates have declined in tandem.

It's probably as well if I don't try to link this to broader patterns in other places, or back to the mice.  In both cases mice and people are intentionally not reproducing, and it's enough to note that this is an isolated case related to degree, but not in relation to it only happening there.  From the framing here it doesn't have anything to with stress response, directly, but instead relates to opposing demands. 

This is really more interesting related to Calhoun's predictions for societal changes during this century than for being a clear tie-in with his experimental results.  He anticipated this, a leveling off of population increase, just not necessarily in this form.  It definitely could be unrelated and coincidental that outcomes from separate causal patterns matched up.

the "beautiful ones" mice case:

Relating to some mice dropping out of playing normal roles in society, or failing to be conditioned to observe those, it would be natural to link this to Millennial generation culture, wouldn't it?  It seems as well to leave the cultural stereotypes out and just cover some clearly noted and documented trends, from a Pew Research Center summary:

Millennial life: How young adulthood today compares with prior generations

The financial well-being of Millennials is complicated. The individual earnings for young workers have remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. But this belies a notably large gap in earnings between Millennials who have a college education and those who don’t. 

...On the whole, Millennials are starting families later than their counterparts in prior generations. Just under half (46%) of Millennials ages 25 to 37 are married, a steep drop from the 83% of Silents who were married in 1968. The share of 25- to 37-year-olds who were married steadily dropped for each succeeding generation, from 67% of early Boomers to 57% of Gen Xers...

In 2016, 48% of Millennial women (ages 20 to 35 at the time) were moms. When Generation X women were the same age in 2000, 57% were already mothers, similar to the share of Boomer women (58%) in 1984.

Of course that mentioned the trend of Millennial generation members to not develop independent living arrangements as often or as quickly as in past generations, tied to higher housing costs and higher student loan debt burdens.

Obviously I'm not implying that Millennial generation members are more likely to drop out social role attributes.  Due to a mix of complex factors it is more difficult for those at the lower end of the economic earnings spectrum to take up those life choices or conditions as quickly, or for as many to.  

Again it's not directly related to any of these specific changes, but Calhoun expected changes to broad social patterns, which he related to population growth, to be initiated in the mid 1980s (in 1970) and then become more completely transitioned by 2040.  It's interesting keeping that time-frame expectation in mind while considering these types of actually-experienced changes.  

Calhoun was a bit idealistic, thinking that people could shed the light of day on underlying social change factors and make conscious choices to affect both individual experience and societal level transitions by the mid 1980s.  50 years later it's still not clear if vaguely related patterns are playing out, or what is causing the changes we definitely do see happening.

Back to the mice

A picture emerges here of these mice predicting some trends we see now.  That's either because that model accurately predicted societal changes 50 years ago, or it's because I've just cherry-picked modern culture themes that at least superficially link to those in the study.  It's more the latter, for sure, but all of these themes are interesting to consider on their own, and also as potentially connected patterns.

Society isn't fragmenting and breaking down though.  Or is it?  To the extent that it may be crowding and mate selection issues don't seem to be at the center of the problems.

Other forms of societal pressures may match some of these patterns, as economic issues result in unusual levels of personal stress.  Atypical levels of social contact alone seem unlikely to cause the same types of behavioral patterns seen in the mice.  

It's essentially a separate issue but atypical levels of social contact may be exactly what a lot of people are experiencing right now, not in the form of who they are confronted with face to face, or walk by, but in relation to social media exposure.  We all "touch on" the lives of hundreds of others on a daily basis by scanning social media posts in discussions (or thousands, really, if you keep reading the comment sections).  It's possible to compare yourself and your potential dating or long term partners to unrealistic beauty or achievement standards through that exposure.  That must cause stress, for some.

I can't really link the current political divide in the US to these themes, but that's definitely stressful, especially right now.  It's as if those mice had somehow divided into two opposing groups that then somehow stayed in constant contact with each other.  

That would be what the crowded group setting mice would have experienced; a non-stop competitive struggle for social position.  It's not clear how female mice experienced that, since my impression was that they weren't actually physically fighting.  But they were also not interacting in any normal way with a male partner (assuming that mice do that, which I'm not clear on).  That could have related to their tendency to move away from the duties of taking care of their offspring, and then later dropping that out.

Even if both the causes and effects don't match up, between mice being crowded and modern social factors, we might be seeing parallels related to people experiencing long term stress responses now.  All of this was interesting for me to consider, even if it never does clearly link in terms of mapping the themes together.

References:

Population Density and Social Pathology, John Calhoun, Scientific American, 1962

Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population, John Calhoun, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, January 1973

John B. Calhoun Film 7.1 [edited], (NIMH, 1970-1972) (there are other Youtube summaries but this is original interview content with John Calhoun)

Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence, Edmund Ramsden & Jon Adams, The Journal of Social History, January 2008 (first published)

How 1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of Humanity, Marissa Fessenden, Smithstonian Magazine (online reference), February 2015

Founding and networking through social media groups

 

I've been involved with starting three Facebook groups and one blog page, and have founded two Quora Spaces and a Reddit sub-forum.  This is about passing on what I learned from that experience.

To back up, I started into exploring social media coupled with an interest in tea some time ago, about seven years back.  Or really more like nine, but this blog started seven years ago.  Basing that online channel exploration around a subject theme helped, since daily life both is and isn't a shared interest.  Using a subject interest as a focus really works better for joining groups and discussions.

Tea wasn't the only subject interest I had, of course, or the only grouping I naturally fell into.  Back then I had just spent about 15 years pursuing an interest in Buddhism (which included being ordained as a monk once), both as philosophy and a religion.  For living in Thailand the expat theme came up, that of being a foreigner living abroad.  Thailand was a recurring theme, for being here, and travel in Asia came up a lot, which is really what led to the tea interest, for running across it a lot.

Enough about me though, on to how founding a social media group works out, some factors to consider going in, and decisions and details that come up.

back in the day in that religious role

Subject theme

I don't tend to see people discuss why to start a group, since it's usually an outcome related to having a well developed subject interest.  Blogging is different; people often ask how to be successful at writing a blog, before they fully narrow down what they have to say.  That's even with the theme of blogging being on the way out, now largely replaced by profiles in Instagram and the like, and discussion in Facebook groups.  Social media sites like Twitter are something else, but that format lends itself to relating to a narrow subject theme; you just follow profiles tied to a theme, and stick mostly to discussing that, or sharing posts about it.

If someone didn't have a really well developed interest in one particular subject starting a social media group would make no sense.  It would also be natural for someone to love a sports team, and certain foods, or travel, fitness, or fashion, to identify with these themes, but not to want to talk to people they don't already know about them.

writing this reminded me that I wasn't in any alumni groups, so I joined one

A commercial interest can help drive these sorts of pursuits.  Someone interested in fitness might only want to keep track of new references about the subject, but someone working as a freelance personal trainer would need to go further with making connections, and gaining exposure.  A tea vendor could start a tea group for the same reason.  They tend not to, but it does come up.  A social media tea group can even be limited to only relating to one particular vendor, like this Yunnan Sourcing Fans group.   That group has 3000 members; that sort of exposure could definitely have a positive impact on business.

It would be a little odd to start a group mostly to see how starting a group would go, but that could work.  It would still need a theme, since a "group about nothing" would go nowhere.  Regional themes can make for an easy fall-back.  I'm from a rural area in Pennsylvania and a local group there has been interesting for re-connecting me to some local news.  It almost goes without saying that a graduating class theme could also work.  Or any interest, really.  The narrower the better, and it's best if you have a really strong connection to the subject, because otherwise continuing with discussion and moderation tasks could become tiresome.

How it went for me

I started with helping two online contacts set up tea groups, one of which I'm still the main moderator for, and most active participant, the International Tea Talk group.  At least in terms of membership count that goes well; that group currently has 13,800 members.  In both cases I helped add some friends with a shared interest to get the group membership base started, and let the groups grow organically from there, or else not develop.

How the theme and activity level worked out is really something else, more mixed, part good and part bad.  It works best if you can set up an active core group that promotes ongoing on-topic discussion, and a feeling of community, but the members who are most active in groups tends to change over time.  In many groups most posts are either blatant spam, ads, or else information sharing designed to push the boundary between discussion and advertising.  

I met some really interesting people through that one group.  If someone said something interesting, or their background was really unusual, I'd say hi by message, and I've talked to a fair proportion of the tea industry that way, people all over the world.  When the pandemic first became active in China and Italy I talked to people in both countries about that, people I had already spoken with.  It helps having an established blog that's related, because it automatically sets up subject credentials that are hard to replicate in another way.  Just being a group moderator doesn't carry much weight.  To be clear I'm nothing like a celebrity, but it's easy to reference my degree of interest and background at a glance here.

The other tea group I helped initiate died of disinterest.  I learned that my approach to tea and that contact's weren't a close match, so I became less active.  Sharing ownership of a group is an odd theme; it might be as well to avoid that.  It worked out well for the other group mainly because the other primary owner is inactive, eliminating most of the potential for conflict over direction.

I also started two Quora Spaces, a bit later on, that site's equivalent to groups, but also in between FB's "group" version and that of topic pages as function goes.  One is about tea (Specialty Tea), back to that central exploration them, and the other is About Foreign Cultures.  Those have 5400 and 11,200 followers, so there seemed to be some interest.  I never hear much about that interest from fellow "Quorans," and only one contact on Quora really seems like a friend, someone who I've met "in real life" a couple of times since.

Related to membership equaling interest, a group can be quite large and still somewhat inactive, or most posts can just be self-promotion.  Those Spaces aren't mostly about followers adding content, so I post almost everything that appears there, along with a function supporting sharing on-topic answer posts from others.  For whatever reason people submit quite a bit of answers to be posted related to culture but not many in the tea space version.  I suppose that is a narrower topic in terms of general following, not just related to the follower count.

Even when page or group stats seem to indicate a moderately high degree of following, for example that stat of 3.2 million combined answer views on Quora, it's not always clear what that means.  I doubt people actually read the answers that many times, and someone scrolling past one in a feed doesn't mean much, or in the Facebook feed context either.  Those two Spaces' stats confirm that posts and topics compete there for interest; there's not as much traffic as the follower numbers would imply.  I don't even check that related to the International group on FB; it's not relevant to me, so I don't keep track.

Life-cycle of groups or forums

A bit on this already came up, but to some extent any online group, or even forums, tend to have a natural life-cycle.  I suppose I don't just mean that they drift off to becoming inactive, also that the patterns related to that seem consistent across types and context themes.  It's not completely unrelated to a person's life cycle and perspective, related to youth being about exploration and development, maturity related to building on already established themes and direction, with prior direction and activity level eventually narrowing and tapering off.  Renewal is possible, with a theme change, or membership change, but more often cycles of renewal tend to taper off too.

An expat forum was a clear example of all this, one of the places that led me to explore social media as much as I did.  It was originally called "Orient Expat" and later converted that to Expat.life when political correctness made that a poor choice of naming.

That forum really stood out, for a number of reasons.  There was an active core group of 8 to 10 main members, with another 20 or so regular participants, and lots of people coming and going, just checking in.  Individual country forums allowed for discussion across the broad region (not so much based out of China and Japan, more in South East Asia), and then discussion of general issues bridged across that.  This Wayback Machine capture register shows it's life-span:

it wouldn't have to relate but I would guess activity level equates to capture counts

Of course the "Xpat.life" site version continued that run, but the writing was already on the wall.  The founder eventually lost interest, after banning more and more people for less and less serious transgressions.

Facebook groups were going to kill it anyway, drawing all the oxygen out of the room for group participation, as they also killed off Google + eventually.

The positive lessons from there still work though, about setting up a core group, enabling themed discussion that still allows for some range, and trying to support Q & A and news posting, and also general discussion.  There was a "shout box" feature there, a nice function enabling chatting beyond post commenting.  I haven't replicated all those things in any given group that I've started, and Facebook groups just aren't set up to.

Using groups for promotion

This could work.  I've already mentioned a commercially oriented group, and of course I add blog posts to the tea group that I moderate.  One main benefit of setting up your own group is choosing the rules, allowing or dis-allowing whatever you want.  A group that's essentially a business page would be unlikely to gain popularity, I suppose unless that business or brand is so successful that it may work to leverage the association, for an entity like Disney, for example.  Of course then a highly successful business wouldn't be seeking to increase exposure through a group or other media outlet (in the same sense), only to serve other functions, to add a communication channel, or develop a new form of association or information distribution.  That Yunnan Sourcing tea vendor fan group serves as an exception; it's more active than the average tea group, and much more active than the three different more conventional forum-based sites (Tea Chat, Tea Forum, and Steepster, with the last split between a discussion section and review functions).

For a typical small business, one selling something, or offering a service, it could be a real challenge to link general subject interest and relatively direct marketing.  Another example of a forum--not the same thing as a group, but related--comes to mind related to this.  

Tea Chat was one of the main tea discussion channels online at one point, probably the overall main one.  They managed to balance commercial interest (they were owned by Adagio, a retail tea vendor) with that discussion hosting role by essentially dropping out all connection to tea sales, by not marketing there.  But then that cost them most of the exposure and business benefit, so eventually, probably related to changes in management, they changed direction and instead emphasized product exposure.  

The conflict between the two themes caused a rift immediately; they ended up deleting posts or topics that ran counter to that positive exposure, and added "fake" accounts for testimonial purposes (allegedly, but some of that negative feedback came from the former main moderator, who was removed from that role).  Maybe a balance could have been struck, but the group probably never would have become as popular if that commercial theme had shared focus initially.  It would be problematic to emphasize only marketing for one related business, and perhaps even more problematic to allow open input from competing businesses.

Blogging dying out--giving way to Instagram following and the like--leads to less conflict of a similar form for mentioning blog links, which most larger Facebook groups simply don't allow.  Which is probably reasonable; to keep commercial or self-promotion posting in check it's necessary to establish clear rules, and a natural cut-off includes preventing blog link posting.

Rules and related issues

It wouldn't work at all to start a group without commercial-scope restrictions; if people joined it that group would immediately become an advertising platform.  Setting a cut-off can be problematic, because any restriction would invoke grey areas.  For example, not allowing ads doesn't necessarily prevent photo sharing or information posts by business profile members, which would essentially be ads.  Not allowing commercial profile members (from FB, or elsewhere, if personal and business accounts are mixed) is one way to move the limit back further.  

All groups would also need to set a limit related to discussion being civil, or eventually a test case would come up.  Other scoping would relate to subject theme.  Tied to a topic like tea that's clear enough, but there's always something, like herb tea (tisanes), or people selling tea packaging machines.  In one philosophy group scope restriction was really problematic, and tone; lots of people were more interested in communicating politically oriented opinions, which isn't conventional philosophy.  It was funny how the owners of the group I'm thinking of leaned into that bias by promoting their own political agenda there, and discussion of the subject philosophy more or less dropped out.

Options / channels

I've mentioned setting up groups in Facebook and Quora so far, but not so much about a failed attempt at a Reddit sub-forum.  I don't love Reddit culture but I'm active in r/tea there.  As an experiment I set up a sub-forum related to non-fiction Youtube video channels, but it didn't gain any traction.  Then again I just posted a few times to it, and didn't do much with promotion before pulling the plug, setting it to "inactive."  In general Redditors definitely wouldn't want to be sold something, or in my interest case to discuss tea in the same form I tend to.  I do answer questions there though, in the main "sub," or post blog links sometimes, which tend to be ignored.

r/tea on Reddit; there are 229,000 members, which adds a need for clearer rules

Since I've brought it up I should be clearer about what doesn't work so well for me about Reddit, but of course different sub-forums, topic discussion areas, are different, so generalizing only goes so far.  Lots of places on the internet pick up a negative discussion tone now, I think related to people being burned out on online contact, and getting in a rut related to promoting their own interests and biases and rejecting others'.  Because people are typically anonymous on there they can say anything, and it doesn't really tie back to them personally, and some few use that to be less reasonable.  Facebook suffers from an opposite problem:  because the profiles are personal self-positioning and promotion come up, even if someone isn't selling something, just in a slightly less visual form than on Instagram.

Facebook is obviously where the people are.  I liked some aspects of Google + but disinterest killed that channel.  It's also worthwhile noting that Facebook pages can serve a related but different role (as for this blog).  Those aren't as group-discussion oriented but can serve as a contact point or for exposure.

New channels are cropping up, which is about time, given how long Facebook has served as a singular main arena.  Discord groups or Slack discussion groups serve some of the same function.  I don't love the Discord format; it looks like an old main-frame environment, I guess on purpose.  I think Slack is more a communications app than a media based social platform, like Whatsapp and the like.  We use Line in Thailand, the Japanese version.  "Groups" in the sense of shared messaging is possible on any of those, but it's not the same, as Zoom video meetings aren't.

Then I guess there's always "in real life" as an option, connecting through sites like Meetup.  A Facebook group would work just as well to coordinate that though, and their media sharing and discussion and message functions enable limited exchanges to occur with or without that face to face step ever happening. 

I started an "in real life" local meeting group but then never held more events

Private online settings that split the difference between old-style forums and these main-channel groups really haven't been developing, at least not much.  This post is mostly about how someone might use an easy-to-establish group form anyway, not about forums, or customizing a new website based version.  I've checked out one recently though, to see how that might be set up, related to a former mob  / mafia captain telling stories on video through a Youtube channel (that group site and Youtube channel).

I'd definitely recommend at least checking out the mob story videos

Conclusions

If someone doesn't feel like there's anywhere they fit in online they could always try to start their own group.  The same would go for promoting a commercial interest, or ramping up blog exposure, whatever it is.  In most main channels there are almost no technical challenges to doing that, just a few details to work out initially, and a monitoring demand to keep up with, filtering the input.  

Pages work well for setting up a contact point, sharing information or media, or letting people follow a theme topic, but groups add discussion and participation depth to that.

A million Quora answer views; how to be popular on Quora

Awhile back I wrote about getting into Quora, participating in that question and answer themed social network site, related to being named a 2018 Top Writer.  This post is a bit of retrospective on how Quora goes, triggered by reaching a million answer views there.

Quora is like a further developed version of Yahoo Answers.  Of course for me it was another place to talk about tea, to answer questions about that subject.

Tea really is a bit of an obsession for me, and it's also about discovering how people use online social networking through a subject interest.  I had been into Buddhism earlier but didn't feel as actively involved with that subject when taking up that review.  I'm an expat in Thailand, and I participate in groups related to that, but it's odd self-identifying as a foreigner, as being from somewhere other than where you are.  Defining yourself as an American expat narrows that, but Americans abroad seem to keep to themselves compared to Brits and others.  So tea it was as a central discussion theme, and still is.

I can pass on thoughts on how people become popular in Quora, and what metrics identify that.  Thinking through what one's goals should be before trying to achieve them makes sense.  To be honest I'm not a "popular Quoran."  I have yet to really take that up as a goal, especially since I'm still figuring out what it means.

My profile mentions a million views, 691 answers, 156 followers.  That last stat isn't very impressive, and the upvotes count--not shown--also aren't.  This also identifies the "Top Writer" recognition that I wrote about last time, and the subjects I write about most:  Tea, Thailand, and Travel.

Looking back to that earlier post here I had 65 followers then (in March), 447 answers written, and 343k answer views.  It's hard to say if either set is really a good stat or not.  If being read is a goal both seem fine, with a million views sounding better.

What does a million answer views mean?

It's a bit hard to place, and using the stats as some form of personal scoring doesn't necessarily make sense.  Upvotes seems better anyway, since that's an indication someone liked the content, not just read it.

That readership number is really high compared to how blogging works out.  This blog has over 250,000 page views, with the better part of 200k of those in the last two years, and not much viewership those first three years.  The Quora stat seems to just relate to people scrolling across answers, not necessarily pulling each one up to read it, so it's easier to cover a lot of ground there.

views for a week; it was a busy week for posts due to writing on a holiday weekend

one-month blog audience location stats; from all over

Is it really a lot though, for Quora?  More popular individual posts for more popular Quorans--they really do use that form--might draw a million views (perhaps not many, but hundreds of thousands is common).  With those numbers that high, and shifting based on content theme, those people seem to keep score more through upvotes, the Quora version of likes, or even upvotes / view ratio. 



I think it works to say that number of views is a lot compared to the main tier of Quora participants who don't put that much time into writing lots of answers or being concerned with readership.  I do write a good number of answers (691 writing this, two more during editing it), but to some extent it's all relative.


To me it's not really about tracking any stats, more like posting to a discussion forum.  It's a way to read around some ideas, comment a little, and write out a couple of paragraph long responses.  Most people stick to a sentence or two, which is enough to capture a couple ideas, but not enough to really develop them.  One word answers are accepted there, just not picture-only answers, per my understanding.

Background on types of users and Q & A themes

Subject specialists might use the site in a different way than general topic writers, and people tend to split along those two lines.  It's not necessarily a bad thing that one group runs with the informative database theme, a little closer to Wikipedia in character, and writes complicated, link-supported answers, and another talks about life experiences, tells stories, offers advice, and posts pictures of themselves.  Social websites seem to thrive when they can be different things to different people, and can evolve to change functions and form to support continued interest.  There's no reason someone couldn't embrace both themes, but it seems to not tend to work out like that.

As for that diversity, being different things, I'm not talking about Facebook being a dual-natured echo chamber for liberals and conservatives through feed filtering.  It's more related to how Reddit sub-forums separate that meta-forum framework into hundreds of different topic-specific partitioned areas.  The old form of Reddit had a "random sub" button that would click you over to a completely random subject page (maybe still available somewhere), and clicking that a few times was interesting, but felt particularly disorienting.  That online world seems too large once you venture out so randomly beyond however many parts that are familiar. 

Quora feeds show you more of what you looked at before, so to some extent both levels of filtering might be occurring, just more at the subject level, perhaps not so well screened for perspective within a subject.  Quora is mostly liberal anyway, as US political inclination goes.

The "keeping score" idea in any of those other online sites or forums just depends on what you are accustomed to.  If you get relatively few Facebook likes in general drawing 10 for a post is an expression of social approval.  If you tend to receive 100 for posts that becomes your norm, until the exceptions above that number make you tend to expect that higher number instead.  I'm not sure why anyone would care what their karma score is on Reddit.

Pros and Cons of the site design

The premise works really well initially;  you can learn about any subject (a little), and can contribute to those you already know about.  It's like posting to Wikipedia before it had developed to where it was (which I didn't do, but I suppose the analogy still works).  The bar is set really low for passing on a better than average answer, and it's not even clear that's really the point for most people anyway.  It can be about improving writing, or social interaction.

That format relates to a main drawback:  contributing to Wikipedia wouldn't feel like social networking, and neither does Quora typically tend to.  There's a messaging function, and the comments to answers do work for a limited discussion space.  If you and a dozen other people all followed each other, kept checking in on answers, and kept commenting it could work as a makeshift forum space, broken by Q & A topic instead of by forum threads, post comments, or retweets.

It tends to work out with smaller forums and groups that a limited number of people form a social center, maybe a dozen or so in a small environment, or a few dozen in a medium size one, perhaps with some central-group heirarchy.  There are definitely 10 or 20 most popular "Quorans," and it's no coincidence that people within that set (as much as it is one) engage with each other, an idea I'll get back to.

I somehow started talking to one guy on there, and he and I met and became friends in real life.  I'll comment on an answer here or there but it takes a lot of those to add up to approximate a forum thread type discussion; more than I ever get around to posting or being responded to.

People tend to talk about Quora more than other sites work out to be introspective:  how do I draw answer views or likes, how do they select the Top Writers, etc.  People on Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter end up talking through local site culture too but the Q & A format lends to doing more with that.  Here's a real answer that ties together both themes, that of "lifestyle" topics and how popular Quorans work out as social groups:

that whole answer list of people really are attractive

my "best picture" has a baby in it

The most popular question and answer form of this goes something like "can you show a picture of yourself," drifting into a self-promotion angle just a little.  This works as a lead into how people can become popular on Quora, since being attractive, being known, and referencing well-known people in an answer or a question are all among the best ways to draw views, upvotes, and following.

How to gain popularity on Quora

There are obvious short-cuts to getting to a very high number of views fast.  One likely channel is to figure out what the Quora algorithms are doing, related to them showing other people your posts.  Some questions have a lot of followers; that makes for an easy identification.  There's a "Digest," an email announcement about posts, and getting answers shown in that is a bit trickier since how that works is never clearly identified.  Getting prior readership of a post seems to trigger that, so it's back to basics, to sorting out how to do that without the Quora site's routing intervention.


The main shortest path is the same approach that works best in every other social media channel, related to every other subject:  be an attractive woman.  To speed that up further attractive women can post plenty of photos, including a few in beach-wear, and talk about the subject of sex.  That first woman referenced in that earlier post works as an example, Sonia Cee:

Back to that earlier "attractive Quoran" answer reference, that post author described her as a dating coach in that earlier citation.  That's two boxes checked for best approach, to talk about interesting subjects and to have a pleasant look.  She probably does write well (what I saw of answers were quite good), and might even have a subject specialist training.  For example, she could be a psychologist, although it's not clear in her profile, and it usually would be.  She has 2.3 million answer views, and 2600 followers (I followed her while looking up citations for this; why not), so related to that routing issue anything she writes is going to automatically be seen by a lot of people. 

To be clear none of this is intended as criticism.  Being interesting to others on multiple levels is a good thing, and if you don't view a lot of answer topics and profiles tying to appearance you won't see that come up much.

Citing her and other popular Quorans' names in a post is one way to increase your own following, and that earlier post example shines more light on that.

That post that cited a dozen or so popular site users' names--for them being attractive--was by Saikat, the profile shown above.  It drew 17k views; around 10% of Saikat's total readership so far, following more than 70 answers that tended to not get seen as often. 

That's back to the subject of working out how a Quora algorithm works.  I only ever saw that post because it referenced those people to draw attention, and then upvotes from that caused Quora site functions to show it around, to mention it to me.  I'm not accusing Saikat of being opportunistic; to some extent he's just engaging other Quorans with in-group social discussion, in a way that could be interpreted in different ways.  Related to whether or not it seems likely that was specifically used to draw viewership the post shown in this capture ends with this comment:


Thank you for your kind perusal.  PS. I literally robot-dance when I get upvotes on my answers.


Still fair enough; it's up to people on the site to decide which parts matter to them, and how to get there.  It's all good.  As to purpose, it's great that people aren't there to argue or "flame" each other, in general.  It's a positive aspect that can be hard to appreciate since it just seems normal, relating to a negative aspect of some other places online.

Back in that other earlier post on being named a Top Writer an interesting distinction came up, related to that form of recognition potentially being used to promote or reward people for creating static content, as a draw to the site.  A subject expert would probably value being named as a Top Writer, just as a popular theme writer might naturally strive to be more popular.  As to how that affects traffic those 17,000 views--about who is most beautiful among Quorans--would come almost entirely from within Quora, users cross-trafficking with other current users.  The most popular posts, even those based on common social themes, may well draw enough traffic to turn up in Google search results, to bring in views from elsewhere, especially if they end up being referenced from outside the site.


While I'm on that subject there's one user's name who seems to come up most as a most-followed Quoran (who was also on that "most attractive" list post), Sean Kernan, who works as an example for the high side for following and viewer count.

161k followers, 105 million answer views, 6.9 million views this month; not bad.  His writing is pretty good, based on lots of interesting experiences, and he seems personable in the answers.  It's not as if he's just worked through social networking algorithms, and makes lots of contacts through comments and messages.  The views would taper off if the material wasn't interesting, and upvotes never would add up.


One last point:  using interesting images works to draw views too, as the graphic equivalent of click-bait.  This is the most popular answer I've written, about how people are identifiable as tourists in Thailand:

It wasn't intended as click-bait, but since I don't have a picture of "elephant pants," which are more or less the tourists' uniform in Thailand, I picked the one that stood out to me most in a Google image search.  I hadn't made the connection before that post that the picture thumbnails could drive viewership, since it doesn't work so well with images of tea. 

That post drew 207k views so far, one fifth of all my readership count.  The content is ok too; it really does describe a number of ways that people stand out in Thailand as tourists, but I suspect that one image had more to do with that readership.  I think it had to be in a popular question to gain any following though, that views only added up because it was already tied to a question that people were reading answers to.

the "175 following" can't be all of it, but readership triggers answer display

One avenue I've barely explored is asking questions.  It's acceptable to ask a question to answer it, as part of the function of setting up content as an answer wiki, of sorts.  If the question is obscure enough--about tea, for example--then it wouldn't draw so much attention.  But eventually beyond just wanting to find out answers an interest in discussing finer points of a topic might be developed through doing this, answering yourself.

Quora and real life

This has always been kind of an interesting feature of how online social networking goes, to me, the extent to which those places overlap with real life, or are designed not to.  Expat forums are the kinds of places where no one uses their real identity.  That's how it typically goes on Reddit too, for that matter, but then that did develop directly out of that older dedicated forum environment and culture.  The main one here in Thailand, Thai Visa, relates a lot to members "flaming" each other.  It's not necessarily a friendly place, unless someone is already  into that.  Another smaller prior version (Orient Expat--no longer functional) was based on a core group instead, and those guys even held periodic meet-ups.

Any social media outlet needs to find ways to re-invent itself, it seems, to endure churn in membership.  They need to keep shifting functions so that they seem new, as Facebook did by adding groups, and then live video functions and stories.

There are Quora meet-up groups; for some people in some places the two themes link.  The site isn't popular enough in Thailand for that to be practical.  In India it definitely is; the most followed members tend to either be Indian or in some cases to cultivate an Indian user following, related to the vast number of users from there.  I can't foresee doing much with real life socializing related to Quora; I only brought it up since it's an interesting sub-theme.

not "real life," but this FB blog page following instead

The main tie to real life would be if a person could become a social media influencer and use that popularity to meet or talk to people in real life, with or without the benefit of formal meet-ups.  Or there is online channel cross-over to consider.  Sean Kernan lists other Instagram and Youtube channel links in his profile, with the Instagram profile now with 7834 followers, and Youtube channel 4086 subscribers(with this video on writing tips worth a look).  Those are getting a boost but not that much of the 161k carries over.


It seems likely a lot of people would link the Quora following and networking to other types of concerns, to draw interest to a business related web-page, for example (or a tea blog).  I've not seen that much of that related to what the other "top Quorans" are doing. 

not really a new trend in online marketing (IG photo credit)

That's probably because it would be obvious to others when Quora is being used for marketing purposes, and even without heavy-handed application it would make the person (or online persona) seem less interesting.  I wouldn't click "follow" on someone's profile if they were obviously selling something.  Then again I suppose I could look past a woman holding up some slimming tea product on Instagram and still appreciate the image, so it might depend on how it was done.


Since for me this is all related to exploring social media it's interesting beyond the actual participation, at the level of how it works.  But I don't hear much feedback or stay in contact with that many people, related to either Quora answers or blog posts.  I talk to more random people in different parts of the world about tea by message than makes sense (more related to being an admin for a FB tea group), but there's a good chance this post won't draw a single comment in the blog itself.  There probably will be only a few comments in FB group link posts, even though hundreds of people will read it.


It seems unnatural to close this without mentioning any answers I've written, beyond that one example.  But it's too far off theme and this runs too long to go into that.  My Quora profile is here; it's easy to look around there.  Once there are several hundred answers filtering them by topic is more practical than reading the list, and I guess people reading this would mostly be interested in that one subject, tea.  If discussing some part of this seems in order this blog's FB page probably works better for that.  Then again this post already badly violated Sean Kernan's key advice for appealing to readers--keep it short--probably already covering more than enough.