Two years ago, I've became disillusioned about the current status of web communities and culture. Basically I was thinking that, the web culture, once hailed as the center of out-of-box thinking, creativity, weird subcultures, e.g. Something Awful and early 4chan, was dying. Of course it has the good, the bad and the ugly, but now it seems increasingly boring.
For example, text boards and forums? Mostly dead. Imageboards? Even small sites dedicated to a particular obscure subculture are dying, the biggest ones are mostly ideological nonsense. Blogs? It no longer has a visible and influential blogosphere. Reddit? Primarily newsfeed and links. Also, lots of communities I was interested in was going downhill. Twitter? Lots of interesting things was happening in the beginning, but nowadays it's a mainstream walled garden, etc.
Even Hacker News had:
* I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-...
So I asked a friend online. He was once active in a technical community and specialized in writing tropes and jokes, but already stopped posting for a while.
I asked: What are you doing nowadays?
He answered: Busy works.
Then I told him my all of my perceptions I mentioned, and asked him: what the heck is going on for web communities? what is the future? what are the places where interesting things are produced nowadays?
He answered: I think it has returned back to the era of chatrooms.
I've realized his judgement cannot be too correct after seeing this article on HN.
Pretty much. I've heard a lot of activities is now happening on Discord servers, especially for gaming, it's almost the role IRC played in the early 2000s. Telegram also has many interesting groups and those dramas and incidents are coming on a weekly basis! I believe the chatroom would be a breeding group for the next wave of web communities.
In short, I guess we've just completed a full circle.
Unfortunately, what it means to me is:
(1) All the legacy of the previous web communities needs to be thrown away.
(2) It may take years for the new communities to recreate some interesting aspects of the old web communities had, and by the time you've rediscovered it, it would be too late.
(3) Most protocols and services and proprietary. Now a even bigger walled-garden is coming.
(4) I cannot be happy enough to see that Hacker News is still going strong. Registering an account was a correct decision. I think Hacker News is largely playing a role of the Usenet newsgroups, but in disguise as a news website. It may not be as effective as forums, but is working pretty well.