Do not expect a reward, dude.

I spent 15 years building a local community, I had 10,000 daily users once, people recognized me on the street, then everyone left on a whim when Facebook made it easier to hang in one's own echo chambers.

I still think it was worth it.

Once in a while, I bump into a stranger, and they tell me how the found their only true love because of me, or how they landed a job that made them loads of money because I facilitated communication in our community. Other times... I barely escaped molestation by a disgruntled member once, and someone threw a glassful of Orval at me (yes, it really happened).

It was still worth it.

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customguy 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A bit of a tangent, but it's fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community. I would like to see a collection of such anecdotes, but I can see why it doesn't get compiled, because it would essentially just be [description of community] and then [Facebook], with no specifically interesting thing to report other than "it petered out". Same for Amazon, come to think of it. You can describe what used to be, and that it's now longer there, but there isn't really any compelling tale in it.

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JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community

There's an analogy here to suffocating in an anoxic atmosphere.

Our bodies don't sense blood oxygen well. Instead, our urge to breathe is mainly driven by dissolved CO2 [1]. So if you're breathing out CO2, and breathing in no O2, your alarm bells stay mostly silent. Your lights go out without your ever being wiser.

Analogously, I think our social senses trigger when we've been away from people we care for. We get that "I haven't seen so and so in a while" urge, which in turn drives reaching out.

The problem is that sense seems almost like a proximity timer. If we've interacted in any way with so and so, it resets. A threshold which appears to be met by e.g. liking a photo on Facebook–empty calories of social interaction. A nitrogen atmosphere giving the perception of normalcy while everything slowly decays. And then, at a moment nobody notices until it's passed, the social rot sets in and a former community is now folks who once knew each other.

It petered out.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515048/#b21

	▲	jbeninger an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This analogy is one of the best I've seen. It's going to live in my head a long time, I think.

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dennis_jeeves2 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>then everyone left on a whim when Facebook made it easier to hang in one's own echo

Personally IMHO I'd rather have a small dedicated bunch of individually do the 'community' thing to each other rather than cater to mass market. I'm selfish and rightfully so.

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NeutralForest 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wasting Orval is the biggest sin of all.

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raffael_de 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's a special rung in hell for people who waste good Orval.

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m0llusk 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Friend, I know where there is stored an entire casque of Orval!

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fredland 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

not if it was open source

	▲	sam_lowry_ 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry for my French, but they say, it's the only masculine name for a beer because it's the verlan of Val d'Or. So... un Orval, not une Orval.

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positron26 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Would like to hear the rest of this story. Don't have an X account atm.

	▲	jkmcf 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Xcancel is your friend.