Making is show business now (2020)
&gt;<i>If you go back to the 90s, when we first figured out how communities built software, it took a lot of work to use the internet. It wasn’t fast or easy, but that made it special: it meant that everyone on the internet cared about it, a lot. You were really committed to being there. Online communities back then were like a federation of villages; each one had its own culture, its own customs, and its own values. The open source community was like that too, and remained so for a long time.</i><p>&gt;<i>In these kinds of environments, attracting more users really did advance open source projects, because the costs were usually worth it. When a new member joined a community, they were probably serious about it. There weren’t many “tourists” back then, so there was a real environment of camaraderie. Existing users were happy to onboard you and teach you things, because their effort would likely pay off as a good investment.</i><p>&gt;<i>Since community members joined slowly and stuck around, there was a lot of trust and shared context in the group. Every community had a different way of working, so there was a fair amount of friction preventing users from jumping around or “surfing” from project to project. Groups could preserve and maintain their collective motivation to keep shipping; they weren’t getting paid, so that motivation was everything.</i><p>&gt;<i>It sounds pretty idyllic, and for many users back then, it was. As the internet grew more popular, the old timers reliably complained every September as a new crop of college freshmen gained access for the first time, not knowing any of the social conventions. AOL opened the floodgates in 1993, which Usenet bitterly declared “Eternal September”, and the internet veterans have been complaining about it since.</i><p>&gt;<i>We know what happened next with online content. The tapestry of forums and newsgroups that made up the early internet flourished for a while, but in the 2000s an invasive species arrived: the platforms. The platforms made it so easy to create, share, distribute and discover that everyone joined them, smushing everything together into common, user-friendly formats without the local context or nuance of the smaller groups.</i><p>It seems to be an: Oh, let me tell you about the good ole&#x27; days when the internet sucked so badly that it amplified natural selection and all the twenty people on it could hack on the Linux kernel and the output was amazing. Now that any peasant can get on the information highway and participate, everything is ruined.