Despite mass protests by users and moderators, Reddit's unique communities look likely to survive the rebellion over the company's new business strategy.
+1 on remembering the smaller-scale “weird web,” and being interested in going back. It’s not possible to really go back, since some of the conditions that made a small, weird web possible (in particular, the impossibility of doing certain kinds of advertising and multimedia hosting) won’t come back. But the emotional dynamics can probably be revived.
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that excluding undesirable people is desirable, or even necessary for the creation of satisfying communities. I remember there always being at least a few people in any forum that no one liked, and there were ways to work around that. IMO communities can repel a certain number of undesirables, even when they show up en masse. It’s corporate interests that are difficult to repel from within a small community.
+1 on remembering the smaller-scale “weird web,” and being interested in going back. It’s not possible to really go back, since some of the conditions that made a small, weird web possible (in particular, the impossibility of doing certain kinds of advertising and multimedia hosting) won’t come back. But the emotional dynamics can probably be revived.
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that excluding undesirable people is desirable, or even necessary for the creation of satisfying communities. I remember there always being at least a few people in any forum that no one liked, and there were ways to work around that. IMO communities can repel a certain number of undesirables, even when they show up en masse. It’s corporate interests that are difficult to repel from within a small community.