618
The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here, and can we go back?
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
618 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59455 readers
4164 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.