Is stackoverflow a chaotic system
As I believe I’ve mentioned once or twice, I have been reading Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin. At the same time I have become severely addicted to participating in the riot of discussion over at stackoverflow.com, the new, and hopefully, self-organised clutter free forum for programmers.
Part of what feeds this addiction is that sometimes you get loads of votes for a mediocre answer, and sometimes hardly any for a great answer, and it becomes a mission… a quest, if you will… to master the beast and always receive great feedback.
Luckily I’ve now managed to get my addiction under control, and it’s all thanks to Deep Simplicity. You see, there is order, where everything is predictable, and there is chaos, where nothing is predictable, and in between there is a thing called (though I don’t think this is quite the official term) self-organised non-equilibrium on the edge of chaos, which is where interesting patterns emerge; things like some regularity in how often ice ages occur, stock market crashes, earthquakes… loudness of music! When events of a particular size will happen cannot be known, but roughly speaking the log of the frequency of the event is proportional to the log of its magnitude.
The important factors to create a system like this are the following:
- Positive & negative feedback mechanisms
- The existance of thresholds which, once the system/part of system crosses it, its state suddenly changes in a disproportionate way to the size of the movement across the threshold
- A constant soure of new energy (or whatever the equivalent might be. For physical systems it’s energy, but that could mean mass, radiation, motion…)
So the question I ask myself is this: Is Stack Overflow a system on the edge of chaos, where answers getting lots of votes will happen rarely, and getting few votes will happen often, but as to precisely which answer will get which number of votes… well, that cannot be determined in advance. In particular, if you could have an objective measure of the quality of the answer, this would not indicate it will get a lot of votes; big up-votes just happen at a particular rate to whichever answers are around.
So what qualifies stack overflow as a nearly chaotic system (from the point of view of a user’s movements through the rankings, not individual questions, though the user is the sum of questions and answers):
- Positive & negative feedback mechanisms
If one person votes an answer up it goes up the page, is more visible and gets more votes, and vice-versa. Also the reputation system adds to this. - The existence of thresholds
If a question gets enough votes it will appear in more places in the site. the same I think is true of answers (this is perhaps tenuous). - A constant soure of new energy
New users join all the time
I will hopefully not forget to see if I can put together a log plot of the number of users versus their reputation score.
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Tags: chaos theory, deep simplicity, stack, stack overflow, theory