This is a continuation of A brief hypothesis about “normies”.
An online community can be like a village, where you have familiar faces, collective experiences, shared values and so forth. It can be like a village and be five people, it can be like a village and be a thousand people.
In this context, the defining trait of a village is that it’s group of people where the average interaction over time is with people you’ve seen before.
The central thesis is that what these villages can’t tolerate is a sustained large influx of strangers.
A slow trickle of strangers is tolerable, a brief large influx is fine; the strangers’ average interaction is eventually stabilizes and biases toward the a stable group of members, and they quickly find shared values and become villagers too.
If the community falls apart and you cannot become true villagers. Find that shared sense of identity the village becomes a “train station”. People passing through, but no one’s home. Places like Reddit and Twitter.
You’re in a train station, you’re not part of it.
The only sense of belonging you can find is through tribalism, deep trenches are dug along the fault-lines of the most superficial differences because that’s all there is to see. Nuance requires lasting relationships. People aren’t really people, they’re reduced to an opinion you can’t tolerate, or a flavor of potato chips you can’t stand, a starter pokemon you think is lame.