That is to say, the people most likely to have something interesting to share are the ones busy trying to find new ways to share it.
That can't be entirely right, can it? A medium's early adopters are really the most likely to have interesting things to say? How can the two possibly be correlated? I agree that there's an obvious pattern between signal:noise ratio and community size, but my gut tells me the reason is likely more than "the early adopters were more interesting."
I can't find the source now, but I recall reading an article that posed another explanation: communities start out small, and the members know the rules/mores/norms and abide them. When a newb steps out of line, the graybeard:newb ratio is small enough that it's not hard for the community's graybeards to reinforce the rules with the him. As the community grows, the definition of what's interesting to it gets more vague and distorted, like a drawing on a balloon that's continually inflated. And if it grows quickly, the graybeard:newb ratio drops. Both factors make it harder to enforce the interesting-ness norms.
"A medium's early adopters are really the most likely to have interesting things to say? How can the two possibly be correlated?"
Since you are asking for a possible explanation, and not a provable one:
People with lots of good things to say naturally seek out places where what they say is not drowned out by meaningless noise. This means that whenever a new publishing medium is established, they jump on it in order to say their good things before Zynga figures out how to use it to broadcast pleas for help milking virtual cows or whatever.
As the community grows, the definition of what's interesting to it gets more vague and distorted, like a drawing on a balloon that's continually inflated. And if it grows quickly, the graybeard:newb ratio drops. Both factors make it harder to enforce the interesting-ness norms.
I think this is a version of (or at least, related to) the concept of Eternal September.
That can't be entirely right, can it? A medium's early adopters are really the most likely to have interesting things to say? How can the two possibly be correlated? I agree that there's an obvious pattern between signal:noise ratio and community size, but my gut tells me the reason is likely more than "the early adopters were more interesting."
I can't find the source now, but I recall reading an article that posed another explanation: communities start out small, and the members know the rules/mores/norms and abide them. When a newb steps out of line, the graybeard:newb ratio is small enough that it's not hard for the community's graybeards to reinforce the rules with the him. As the community grows, the definition of what's interesting to it gets more vague and distorted, like a drawing on a balloon that's continually inflated. And if it grows quickly, the graybeard:newb ratio drops. Both factors make it harder to enforce the interesting-ness norms.