These are not mass arenas; they are clubs — opt-in spaces with boundaries, where people remember who you are. And they are often paywalled, or at least heavily moderated, which at the very least keeps the bots out. What’s being sold is less a product than a sense of proximity, and while the economics may be similar, the affective atmosphere is... See more

And yet, precisely as the platforms became more universal, they became more destructive of community. Communal in clusion relies on ex clusion: some notion of who is and is not a member of the group, and some ways of enforcing that boundary.

the concept, popularized by danah boyd, of context collapse — what happens to information when it’s stripped of context and jumbled together. In short, the result is a profane meaninglessness that can short-circuit our ability not only to think, but to do anything at all.