In the early days the internet was a free, egalitarian space for anyone to surf. Now, commercial interests rule – but users do still have some control.
The normies are not the problem, they are the victims. The abusers are the giant corporation manipulating the masses and monetizing a publicly funded infrastructure for their own gains.
The point isn’t “it’s their fault”. But it changes the dynamic.
An enthusiast community can, for good and bad, largely self regulate. It’s easier to keep corporate interests either out, or engaging on your terms.
Once the community grows to include a high enough proportion of casual participants, that ability goes away, because manipulations that don’t work on inquisitive expert audiences do work on less informed ones, and less willing to question. It’s harder to establish who actually knows what they’re talking about by reputation, it’s harder to weed out the trolls from the naive, and it’s just generally harder to keep the focus of the community where you want it to be.
Corporations are one of the groups of bad actors manipulating that difference in dynamics, but the dynamics are different because of the large influx of people who don’t understand as much and aren’t trying to.
I’m not saying there are no enthusiast spaces. I’m just explaining some of the tradeoffs that come with too low of a barrier entry when forming a community.
You want to be welcoming and accessible, not intimidating, etc, and I’m not saying any of that is bad. But you lose some of the magic where the whole community is relatively enthusiastic and has a shared vision for what it is when it’s easy for anyone to join and pull their own way.
The normies are not the problem, they are the victims. The abusers are the giant corporation manipulating the masses and monetizing a publicly funded infrastructure for their own gains.
The point isn’t “it’s their fault”. But it changes the dynamic.
An enthusiast community can, for good and bad, largely self regulate. It’s easier to keep corporate interests either out, or engaging on your terms.
Once the community grows to include a high enough proportion of casual participants, that ability goes away, because manipulations that don’t work on inquisitive expert audiences do work on less informed ones, and less willing to question. It’s harder to establish who actually knows what they’re talking about by reputation, it’s harder to weed out the trolls from the naive, and it’s just generally harder to keep the focus of the community where you want it to be.
Corporations are one of the groups of bad actors manipulating that difference in dynamics, but the dynamics are different because of the large influx of people who don’t understand as much and aren’t trying to.
Aren’t we already doing that though with Mastodon, Lemmy etc?
I’m not saying there are no enthusiast spaces. I’m just explaining some of the tradeoffs that come with too low of a barrier entry when forming a community.
You want to be welcoming and accessible, not intimidating, etc, and I’m not saying any of that is bad. But you lose some of the magic where the whole community is relatively enthusiastic and has a shared vision for what it is when it’s easy for anyone to join and pull their own way.