This is great, especially the 'containers' model - but it doesn't factor in the explicitly adversarial portions of the game. Sometimes we grow by directly attacking other people's slice of the pie, rather than pushing everyone out to make the pie bigger. And sometimes we grow by holding the pie tight so no one can push, and then waiting for someone to directly attack someone else for a slice of the pie, and then coordinating everyone else to attack that person for defecting on the group, and then being better at taking up the space that they used to occupy because we planned the whole thing from the beginning. And sometimes we grow by waiting for someone else to play the Machiavellian lets-you-and-him-fight game, and then darting in and stealing the scraps. And all these things actually happen more often than the pie simply growing, and I wish we attended to them more.

I think one of the results of Escalating Asks is that instead of a community being something you put work into FIRST in order to be paid back LATER somehow, that most community members actually start out in debt to the community. If they hang around a while and become regulars then they break even, where they are starting to do their equal share. And it's only until they've been around a long time that they are net contributors that are paying it forward.

A dojo isn't a good example for this, because new members are paying money to compensate. But for a free martial arts club: A new person is receiving instruction and maybe some free nunchuks. They are in debt to the community. A regular helps out the new people, but gets helped by older members. They break even. An older member is putting more resources into the community than they take out, but in exchange they tend to have large amounts of social status given to them.

A strong community has the resources built up to invest in many new people, even if only a fraction stick around to be net contributors.

I like your models. Do you think you can make them into quantitative ones?

Here are some caveats:

Model 1: Escalating Asks and Rewards

• I have experienced several communites with a 'not me'-mentality, where people are on bord for the fun, but do not want any work. This is strong evidence against universality of Model 1.

• On the other hand, I have experinced communities where this escalation happened and people told stories of how important their work was. So I definitely think this happens, but I can't think of a good predictor for whon or when model 1 applies.

Model 2: Imperfect Containers

Most humans seek some form of novelty; most humans desire growth.

This smells like the typical mind/sex-life fallcy. People in my filter bubble? Yes. My (grand)parents? (Much) less so.

I think this assumption (and thus Model 2) is only valid for a small subset of humans: Ambition and novelty-seeking should be a good predictor for whom Model 2 applies to, age and conservativeness should correlate negatively with model accuracy for these subgroups.

Here's an informal model I saw a while ago, with some similarities to Model 2:

"Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic."

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths