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Comment by qPM9l3XJrF | Hacker News Reader

In absolute terms, the internet has many many more people now than it did in the early days. If you want to create a small quirky community, you only need a tiny fraction of those people to sign up. So in theory the modern day could be a Cambrian explosion of tiny communities. Is this the case? If not why not? Maybe there are a lot of them hiding and they fear eternal september? I can think of a few but maybe I shouldn't be linking them...

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I think the biggest issue is the majority of internet users don't want to join small communities, just one website or app that has all their friends and family. Aside from this, the cost of making a big (the main goal of every social network is go big or go home) social network is increasing as "big" gets bigger and safety requirements get harder to meet.

Desire for friends & family doesn't explain the popularity of twitter, reddit, or youtube.

Thanks to the platforms solving for that side of things, the niches happen within the larger platforms now, like “health insta,” “cryptotwitter,” “yogatok.”

I really do miss the obscure forums of the early 2000s though. The more intimate connections with an anon don’t happen as often (anecdotally, for me) in these subgroups of the big networks.

Unfortunately, these channels always have ulterior motives because of the social network's ability to create stars, and have them cash in via influencer deals or other benefits of online fame.

Did people really want one big website or were they railroaded into it by a handful of big corporations that stood to benefit from it?

Early on, people (in the US) signed up to companies like Compuserve or AOL which were walled gardens much like Facebook with a "there be dragons" type warning if you chose to venture out into the "real" Internet.

At this point communities sprung up, and were (if lucky) found and hand-indexed by Yahoo or they banded together via web-links.

We then got communities of communities beginning with GeoCities and then MySpace.

It wasn't until Facebook that everyone's personal page looked identical to everyone else's, and surprisingly everyone seemed to like that.

At some point, maybe we'll go back to rolling own own communities, but I doubt it. Security considerations and the constant attacks by scripts/botnets, not to mention data loss and privacy breach legislation, have made the Internet very unfriendly to non-corporates: Ttoo much work and stress.

As far as corporates railroading us: Government legislation is the biggest bar to entry and only necessary because corporates forced everyone to use real identities: where back in the good old days "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog".

Lots of medium-size websites had active comments sections back in the day. Increase in trolling, harassment and spambot comments were too much for the sites themselves to moderate.

Lots of sites began to encourage users to take the conversation to Facebook, which they felt would at least be free of "ChEap J0rdAn$, pr_ada bags" type comments.

Little did they know. The comments sections are why a lot of people visited the site in the first place. Once the comments migrated to Facebook, so did the site's audience.

>So in theory the modern day could be a Cambrian explosion of tiny communities. Is this the case?

Yes, it has been.

>Maybe there are a lot of them hiding and they fear eternal september?

They're mostly on centralized social media platforms like Reddit, and discovery of niche content is more difficult on the modern web, but that doesn't mean that content isn't out there. I'm using "community" here to refer to a group of people with common interests, not an individual website. So "Reddit" is not a community in and of itself, but /r/niche_subreddit_youve_never_heard_of is.

Yes, that exists in subreddits and Facebook and other site groups. The problem is that those mediums suck, can be hard to find, want to remain exclusive and in many cases the content is walled. Subreddits are generally the most open, but there is so much content in Facebook groups but with terribly low accessibility

You've missed one that's flown under my radar until lately, Discord servers. And you might say "well yeah but that's just IRC, nothing new" and to some degree that's true, but I feel Discord also attracts people that wouldn't have been willing to use IRC.

IRC would be fine if it had one feature that is expected today:

Persistence.

If you close your IRC client, you will miss anything that is sent while you're gone. You can't close it and come back to it later. That behavior is considered unacceptable today.

There's also the fact that people want and expect their communication platforms to support the posting of images and videos in-line. IRC doesn't have that.

Discord essentially is just IRC updated for the modern age.

I've used Discord on and off since 2017. I wouldn't say it's the same at all. Perhaps it's a generational gap, but I find it is much more, for lack of a better word, 'policed' than traditional chatrooms and IRC. People seemed much more open to discussing divisive topics, usually (ir)religion related on IRC for sure.

Over the years, the freer Discord communities I've been a part of have ended up having to close off to newcomers and wound up dying, because people have inevitably got upset and gone out of their own way to close down the community. And Discord seems to have many more people who get upset at things you ordinarily wouldn't ever conceive as being remotely abrasive.

I remember 'raids' on IRC and a lot of petty interpersonal drama, rumour mongering and community splits and feuds, but moderation was far more lax and I never had a single community I was on get falsely reported and taken down by the owners of the IRC server.

I don't feel it's a platform where people are allowed to truly speak their mind like the communities I was once a part of, because all it takes is a few upset people to mine for reportable posts and your community is gone. There's no alternative site, no way to self host and no other server to jump to. It's just not the same.

Subreddits are honestly pretty terrible for niche interests compared to a traditional forum. In a normal forum, if your thread about 1998 Honda Civics gets a single post to it a month, so be it, but people are at least posting in a relevant thread and reading up on the discussion that's already been started potentially years ago earlier in the thread. On reddit, you have to post a new submission all the time for a topic to stay in play even in a given niche interest subreddit. You can't post comments on threads that are too old, and new comments don't bump up these old threads anyway. It leads to the same old ground being covered all the time (sometimes you can imagine exactly what the top comment will be), and fragments discussion.

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