Online Niche Communities

what Yancey Strickler calls  Dark Forests . According to him these are “spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments”.

One major benefit of subcultures is that they open up necessary space when the mainstream becomes too crowded. Now, thanks to the internet, everything is supposedly a subculture—the mainstream has supposedly broken into a thousand fragments. One would assume this creates more room for everyone to spread out, literally and figuratively, but even