I was denied admission to a PhD program because of my perceived political views

Reddit's reddiquette advises users to use the downvote arrow only to indicate that a post is not constructive or off-topic. Further, users are told that it's best not to downvote just because they disagree with something.

The vast overwhelming majority of users on that site use downvotes to indicate disagreement, or dislike. That interpretation of downvoting has, like it or not, spread throughout the internet. Here? Yes, probably even here.

>The first wave of forums were built from the ideas of Usenet, IRC, and ISP-hosted chatrooms: open-access "places" that served as Schelling points for anyone interested in a topic. There was no real possibility for moderation, and the sheer scale of the problem (the possibility of a 10000:1 user-to-moderator ratio) made "community-building" impossible.

It's quite possible to create a community in an IRC channel. I was part of several quite vibrant communities in various IRC channels in the mid to late 1990s. It's also possible to moderate IRC channels. You can be kicked out of a channel for a period of time, banned from channels, or even entire networks. Operators in individual channels can even choose to grant "voice" to some people and then set a channel mode (+m, for moderated) so that only people with voice can even speak in the channel.

>One more interesting aspect of the newer Internet is that, when engaged in these group-forums, people naturally lean toward developing "faces": different presentations of aspects of themselves, tuned to the interests and values of the group.

Sociologists have long studied how people present different aspects of themselves to different groups depending on the norms of those groups. I would not call that a feature unique to the "newer" Internet, but the newer internet does allow for greater separation of whatever parts of your personality you feel like expressing.

I miss the old culture of the Internet because it was easier for me to find people who shared my interests but had viewpoints different enough from my own that it was possible to have very interesting conversations. Your definition of community sounds, quite frankly, rather boring to me. I fall solidly in the camp of "nothing interesting is happening without a little conflict". What has been lost on this "newer" Internet is the ability to have an ideological conflict remain purely ideological. There is a greater tendency for online conflict to veer into the realm of the personal, especially in these modern communities that you prefer, because there's a shortage of ideas that are "permissible" to argue about.

My $0.02, anyway.

Define "crowded" (how many people per acre does a typical spaceship hold? How about the earth?). Define "limited" (the spaceship analogy heavily implies it's being used in a sense other than "not infinite"). Go find out what this "renewable" stuff people keep talking about these days is.

> It's quite possible to create a community in an IRC channel.

Sure, but it didn't used to be the norm. The usage of IRC has shifted over time, from "channel-as-place" to "channel-as-community", with many of the original "channel-as-place" IRC networks now dead or virtual ghost-towns. The big reason everyone is in a love-fest for Slack but can't quite enunciate is that it's IRC but with multiple channels for each community, which encourages people to distinguish the two concepts further.

> I would not call that a feature unique to the "newer" Internet.

I didn't mean to imply it was, but rather that the first-wave of BBSes was a unique time because there was very little of that; everyone was their full self, in all their horrible glory.

It may have helped that many Internet users up through the early 90s were nerds without enough emotional intelligence to see the point in putting up a face; and that the great number of these made it easier to drop one's own face without being judged for it.

You can still see this effect on e.g. 4chan, where it's impossible to feel "excluded" in any ongoing sense, because of the lack of persistent identity. Anyone who says that "4chan's anonymity is valuable, because it generates a lot of Original Content" means specifically that people dropping face enables for some uniquely-interesting interactions.

> What has been lost on this "newer" Internet is the ability to have an ideological conflict remain purely ideological.

This still happens—but, instead of being an automatic result of everyone just sort of airing their views in the open and colliding (and then blocking everyone annoying enough until everyone who's left has this ability), you have to actively look for a community where "keeping ideological arguments ideological" is a cultural norm of that community.

http://slatestarcodex.com/ 's comments section (which has somehow become a vibrant community, despite the worst UX for community-building ever) is a pretty good example: there are people from everywhere on the political spectrum, of several religions and varying backgrounds, engaging with one-another on some decidedly controversial topics, where it's the culture of the community—and the desire not to lose it—that keeps everything civil.

What outrage? Simply teaching you some respect, as well as some factual accuracy.