I find it curiously amusing that EVERY online community is "in decline" at all times.
I discovered Usenet and IRC back in September, 1993. An epoch known in Internet cultural history as Eternal September (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September). The Internet has literally been in decline since I discovered it!
Back in the day, even in its prime, every other comment on Slashdot was a meta discussion of how badly Slashdot was declining.
Reddit started out as a site for top-level post content only. When they added support for comments, 10 years ago, the VERY FIRST comment in Reddit history was a claim that Reddit was going downhill! (https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/17913/reddit_no...)
I believe that the "sweet spot" for on online community is one to three months after you've discovered it. Just long enough to get comfortable with its internal cultural cues and quirks and in-jokes, and feel like an insider. Once that point is reached, familiarity immediately starts shifting into contempt. You're never quite able to recapture that novel feeling of initial discover and inclusion, and so it feels like decline whether it is or not.
Yeah, it's a meme as old as the internet (and decline is older still), but I still think it's true. There are the rare occasions I've seen though where you have long plateaus (years, not just a few months), sometimes even upswings (and not just from judicious ban-hammering), but you either die in relative high quality on those plateaus or live long enough to see yourself become a subreddit.
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I find it curiously amusing that EVERY online community is "in decline" at all times.
I discovered Usenet and IRC back in September, 1993. An epoch known in Internet cultural history as Eternal September (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September). The Internet has literally been in decline since I discovered it!
Back in the day, even in its prime, every other comment on Slashdot was a meta discussion of how badly Slashdot was declining.
Reddit started out as a site for top-level post content only. When they added support for comments, 10 years ago, the VERY FIRST comment in Reddit history was a claim that Reddit was going downhill! (https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/17913/reddit_no...)
I believe that the "sweet spot" for on online community is one to three months after you've discovered it. Just long enough to get comfortable with its internal cultural cues and quirks and in-jokes, and feel like an insider. Once that point is reached, familiarity immediately starts shifting into contempt. You're never quite able to recapture that novel feeling of initial discover and inclusion, and so it feels like decline whether it is or not.
Yeah, it's a meme as old as the internet (and decline is older still), but I still think it's true. There are the rare occasions I've seen though where you have long plateaus (years, not just a few months), sometimes even upswings (and not just from judicious ban-hammering), but you either die in relative high quality on those plateaus or live long enough to see yourself become a subreddit.