This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in general.
I think the model demonstrate how the ’enshittification’ process is an inevitability with any social media that is run on a venture capital model.
An online community can be like a village, where you have familiar faces, collective experiences, shared values and so forth.
I must say, I was always a stranger on Reddit and everyone was a stranger to me. I was there for the interesting links and discussions, but never for the people or the community.
Being a jerk wasn’t the norm, so it wasn’t as bad as portrayed in the article, but it certainly wasn’t a village at any point. Sure, I visited many small subs all the time, so those places could have been villages, but I was always a traveler, constantly on the move. If I noticed a particular username, I was nearly guaranteed never to see that name again, so I never really paid much attention to the thousands of names I would inevitably forget.
I hear a lot of people talk about how Reddit was full of terrible people. I very rarely saw these people though. Not sure if their voices got down-voted, or maybe I simply stayed away from the communities they gravitated to. Personally I never really browsed Reddit home screen, I just bookmarked the communities I liked and went directly to their pages. So maybe that’s how I missed out on a lot of it.
That said, I did se quite a bit of nonsense when browsing gaming forums. PC gamers hating console gamers, xbox gamers mocking ps gamers and vice-versa. Never did understand peoples need to be superior in the gaming world. These are all just methods of enjoying the same hobby!
As long as you stayed in small, well moderated subreddits you did find what the OP describes as a community, i for one tended to shy away from the big ones and specially the default biggest
The problem is that smaller subs could be Eternal Septembered almost overnight by getting onto /r/all and being swamped by people with no interest in following the established norms. The UK politics sub after Brexit for example was never the same again.
I’ve noticed that it really matters which subs you read. I tried to make my reddit experience a bit more serious, so that I wouldn’t be just joyscrolling cat gifs all day and doomscrolling hate news all night. That’s why I focussed a lot on Linux, FOSS, science, technology, engineering, maths, statistics, biology, physics, chemistry subs and stayed away from subs that were more focused on entertainment and jokes etc. That’s probably a big reason why I didn’t see that many jerks.
I had the same experience. That said, I also was apparently in mid sized subs, or the ones that were sort of Q&A (sysadmin, askphotography) so I never saw a sense of community. I might recognize 5 usernames as having good or bad answers / comments, but being topic focused (even tv or movies was like this) I never really formed any kind of connection.
The closest I could see like that is actually on things like the subs discord where you’re kind of shooting the shit a lot more, and it seems more ephemeral. Like Photography discord has an off topic and a computer and a tv channel as well as a lounge / anything channel. These are the photography people talking about other stuff too so you kind of can get to know them. On reddit these are all different subs, so you’ll never get the photography subs feeling about the latest anime…
Idk, I also may just be strange.