The Power of Dense Networks

Background

Before moving to SF, I mostly had hub-and-spoke friendships. Most of my friends were people I just hung out with 1:1. Although this is great for getting to know each other and growing closer, it has several problems.

  1. It isn’t scalable. I only have so many social hours in a week, and while the number of people I want to spend time with increases, my bandwidth does not.
  2. This time constraint makes it difficult for me to meet new people & try new experiences.

Cliques

At the time, I also had cliques. A clique is defined as any close set of people where if you invite one person, any other person(s) from the clique can show up without surprising you at all. This is beneficial for people who simply want to satisfy their social needs, but not people who want to maximize on socializing. This brought several problems.

  1. It was hard for me to explore without feeling guilt for not bringing others.
  2. It was hard for me to learn new information about the world because of their consistency.

Dense Networks are the answer!

  1. They allow your friends to meet each other. Assuming you have a strong understanding of each, one of the best things you can do for your friends is to share them with each other. You find them valuable; they likely will as well.
  2. Groups are self-sustaining & efficient holding structures for friends. Instead of spending 5 hours catching up with 5 friends, you can spend 1 hour catching up with 5 friends. Even if you don’t actually interact with each individual for a similar length of time, their “most recent hangout timer” is still reset.
  3. Groups allow you to experience varying dynamics. Certain types of humor, bonding, etc. are only possible in specific group dynamics, like a hot seat or eavesdropping on the questions your friends ask each other. If I’m interested in someone, I have a limited line of reasoning for learning about them but if we hang out with another, that 3rd person may have a different line of questioning that reveals other insights about the 2nd person to me.
  4. Passive Investment: When the group gets large enough, especially in the city, you break out of clique-tendencies. Each person is continuously running into new people, and automatically perform filtering on them. You can sit in the middle and reap the benefits of the cream of the crop of your friends’ friends.
  5. Leveraged Investment: They also allow you to learn more about the world! In this sense, social networks can be leveraged similarly to money. Money is powerful because it is convertible to influence, power, information, and resources. Social capital is power because it is convertible to influence, power, information, and also resources. Money and social capital can convert into each other, although there are some lossy caveats: social climbers are frowned down upon, but money grinders are glorified.
  6. As the group grows, it also starts to develop into a community. It’s easy for you to build rapport with anyone else in the group simply because of the incredible shared context you now have. People implicitly care about each other because they continuously run into each other, and likely have shared values (the values that made us all friends in the first place).

Another Answer: Friendship Models

There’s another approach that works in parallel, but I’ll talk about that here.

Possible Problems with Dense Networks