NA
Social scalability is the ability of an institution –- a relationship or shared endeavor, in which multiple people repeatedly participate, and featuring customs, rules, or other features which constrain or motivate participants’ behaviors -- to overcome shortcomings in human minds and in the motivating or constraining aspects of said institution that limit who or how many can successfully participate. Social scalability is about the ways and extents to which participants can think about and respond to institutions and fellow participants as the variety and numbers of participants in those institutions or relationships grow. It's about human limitations, not about technological limitations or physical resource constraints.
Even though social scalability is about the cognitive limitations and behavior tendencies of minds, not about the physical resource limitations of machines, it makes eminent sense, and indeed is often crucial, to think and talk about the social scalability of a technology that facilitates an institution. The social scalability of an institutional technology depends on how that technology constrains or motivates participation in that institution, including protection of participants and the institution itself from harmful participation or attack. One way to estimate the social scalability of an institutional technology is by the number of people who can beneficially participate in the institution. Another way to estimate social scalability is by the extra benefits and harms an institution bestows or imposes on participants, before, for cognitive or behavioral reasons, the expected costs and other harms of participating in an institution grow faster than its benefits.
Innovations in social scalability involve institutional and technological improvements that move function from mind to paper or mind to machine, lowering cognitive costs while increasing the value of information flowing between minds, reducing vulnerability, and/or searching for and discovering new and mutually beneficial participants.
Information flows between minds – what I have called intersubjective protocols – include spoken and written words, custom (tradition), the contents of law (its rules, customs, and case precedents), a variety of other symbols (e.g. “star” ratings common in online reputation systems), and market prices, among many others.
Matchmaking is facilitating the mutual discovery of mutually beneficial participants. Matchmaking is probably the kind of social scalability at which the Internet has most excelled. Social networks like Usenet News, Facebook, and Twitter facilitate the mutual discovery of like-minded or otherwise mutually entertaining or mutually informing people (and even future spouses!). After they have allowed people more likely to be of mutual benefit to discover each other, social networks then facilitate relationships at various levels of personal investment, from casual to frequent to obsessive.
Markets and money involve matchmaking (bringing together buyer and seller), trust reduction (trusting in the self-interest rather than in the altruism of acquaintances and strangers), scalable performance (via money, a widely acceptable and reusable medium for counter-performance), and quality information flow (market prices).