Ron Dickey wrote:...
why do I feel like I am pushing back the cobwebs.
Ron
Funny isn't it? When teardrops (as well as other camping things, RVs, vans, etc) are at an all time high of modern popularity? So what's happened?
This is a feature of the platform-ification, and eventual complete
enshittification, of the Internet. The industry-speak for the driving force behind this process is called "monetization of user generated content." We all know the big players that do this like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube; but there are also some small players, like the
ones who apparently bought this forum a few years ago. Eventually the loss of connection between the third party platform owners and the user base creates a cascading series of failures as described more thoroughly by Cory Doctorow (author, Special Advisor, Electronic Frontier Foundation) on his blog
here as well as in dozens of other posts, speeches, and
similar work in academic circles that explore the phenomenon and the incentives behind what monetization does to user generated content over time in different contexts. IIRC I think it was Grant's website for gatherings was last updated in 2015 before it went offline. Basically, the would-be torch bearer's of self managed and self run communities are now trapped in someone else's maze, and the failures this causes over time leads to the atrophy and eventual death of once vibrant social systems that existed outside monetization pressure. Stated another way and outlined in that post on Cory's blog, network effects lead to "the curse of bigness," and the users that
would have self-managed communities like these well into the future have trapped each other into non-interoperable platforms that exist to extract maximum value at a great cost to the actual real world social ties of these so-called social networks.
I used to help forums like these run themselves in not for profit, fully member managed, non-monetized. Today, it has never been
technically easier to do so, the tools themselves like the hosting and free and open source, now-interoperable (federated) forum software like Discourse are easier to use than ever before, and at a lower monetary cost than ever before as well. The "market" for such self directed communities however, is nearly non-existent now - most forums that still exist have been gobbled up by marketing ad firms or they just died as the user base left for platforms that will eventually atomize them into a larger, but far more dysfunctional, island blobs on larger corporate platforms. This has a direct impact on things like in person gatherings, in particular because monetized platforms are universally bad, by design, at interoperability - if you are not a member on whichever mass social media junkheap where people are discussing X, Y, or Z - you will often never find them - they rarely show up in search engine results, are often locked behind obnoxious advertising malware, login screens, poor organizational information structure, or members-only viewing restrictions (ie the data is not actually on the open internet), etc. This is how eventually communities die, by a death of a thousand tiny cuts. It's a hard process to watch having seen it play out dozens of times personally already, but the good news is the process is slow and you can keep outrunning the fires for a good long while, but I've rarely seen a community escape intact. The few that did were usually open source software or similar communities that had an easier time understanding the risks presented by platforms and monetization, and similar techniques like
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish coined by Microsoft in their early attempts to kill free and independent software projects were familiar to them already.
Apologies for the wall of text, I spent a lot of time on this problem years ago, before I threw in the towel.
