Recipe for Healthy Scenes
It seems to me that affinity based on parallel participation in a specific activity — that is, not COLLABORATIVE participation in the same INSTANCE, like playing a game together, but rather each person in their own “lane” on the same “highway” — is a bad recipe for community.
People should probably stop using the word “community” online, anyway. It sets people up for disappointment, because it calls to mind the physical social infrastructure that makes actual living possible, which this is not. But here I mean it only in the vague conventional sense.
You want to get to know people and have friends to talk to, the internet makes it possible to scour the earth for the exact right ones, and INTERESTS are an obvious precision tool for finding them. A bunch of people who all like to do a thing, getting together. How fun.
But you forgot to check whether you actually get along with these people, which requires doing stuff other than the Super Fun Thing We Love and seeing if there’s still chemistry.
Now add in popularity and economics, to imagine the worst case.
If it’s going to be a competitive marketplace, rather than a fun thing we all just do and vibe on, it needs to be set up that way. There can’t be trickery around whether or not some activity is For the Community, especially in the form of double standards for different people.
A marketplace can still be fun. But only to the extent to which people’s intentions are clear to themselves and others.
What happens with online interests, with the scale they bring, is that the opportunity to make participation sustainable on an individual basis appears for different participants at different times and speeds.
This is not fair, which The Market doesn’t care about, but humans do.
(I’m focusing on online dynamics because that’s where we are, but the general dynamics certainly obtain in offline scenes as well, if those can be said to be a thing anymore. All my people who have worked in the arts can attest.)
One of the big traps is that this first, uneven business growth phase is even MORE fun than the beginning. So-and-so’s making it big! I’m friends with a famous person! They’re still humble because they don’t believe it’s happening! We’re LEGIT and VALID!
This, of course, sets everyone up for disappointment and betrayal.
In my time on this Earth trying to make friends, the most fruitful pursuit has always been finding people whose company I enjoy while nothing in particular is going on.
We always get up to something eventually.
