It reminds me of a chapter in Alex Pentland's book Social Physics where he looked at the performance of IIRC eToro traders and the degree to which ideas spread among traders and the collective returns on investment.
When there was extreme levels of connectivity and copying between traders collective returns went down because diversity of trading strategies went down, when there was too little connectivity the same thing happened as optimal strategies could not spread effectively.
The maximum returns were achieved somewhere in the middle when there was both room for individual new strategies to emerge but enough connectivity for good strategies to spread avoiding both a sort of herd dynamic and isolation.