Online communities

So no one told us the internet was gonna be this way | The Outline

An interview with Joanne McNeil about her new book, Lurking:

Someone who was creating, say, a small decentralized community for a specific group of people would not have luck finding investors, as opposed to Facebook, which sought to build a platform for all.

‘Sfunny, when I was on Quarantine Book Club the other day, this is exactly what I talked about one point—how Facebook (and venture capital) moved the goalposts on what constitutes success and failure on the web.

Exquisite Tweets from @neb

There was a moment that it seemed like a proliferation of flickr-like webservices would result in a network of deep shared pools of cultural resource, from which every user could build expressions and applications, but the “entrap and surveil” economics of platforms kicked in.

And now we have no history, and rather than communicating via visualizations of our own shared cultural record, we are left waiting like dogs for treats as facebook decides to surface one of our own images from 3 or 8 years ago. Don’t try to search the graph! Advertisers only.