You just reminded me of this piece by Danah Boyd
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 2 months ago
It is ok. I actually prefer the internet as a niche phenomenon. I was on it and I was the only one, and I was cool with that because it had all kinds of nerd stuff. Now it's all normal people stuff and hostile nonsense and money, and I'd kind of like to just have the unpopular nerd internet back.
flashgnash@lemm.ee 2 months ago
That wasn’t really my point, I quite like it too but the presence of the nerd net doesn’t mean the mainstream internet stuff goes away