Understanding the scaling of social organizations using Reddit*

When individuals form social organizations around shared interests or common goals, they can generate new ideas and accomplish complex tasks. To understand why some organizations are more successful than others at attracting supporters and reaching their goals, we need a model of organizations that can be experimentally validated. We identify Reddit's r/place experiment as a model system in which we can study organizations and their ability to achieve a collective goal. In this unique experiment, different groups on Reddit compete to craft pixel art on a size-limited canvas of pixels, which allows us to observe the behavior of communities and their individuals as they compete for space on the canvas. Using the pixel and user data, we examine scaling laws that relate the community size to variables that describe their art and user dynamics. We find categories of variables that scale sub-linearly, linearly, and super-linearly with the size of the group. These results suggest the presence of underlying interaction networks that drive the formation and behavior of organizations, similar to the role of networks in biological systems and cities, where various scaling laws are also observed. We aim to understand how the structural properties of these networks relate to the behavior of the organizations, which could enable us to develop a mechanistic model for the formation and efficiency of social organizations.