It’s also not a new belief. I remember all of the skepticism about Wikipedia being possible when it was a new idea.

What’s interesting is that most younger people I interact with now have a better idea of what’s possible through crowdsourced collaboration than older people. In the tech world, people who grew up with crowdsourced sites have seen the end state of Stack Overflow and its moderation, or they’ve seen enough controversies around Wikipedia edit wars where controversial topics become battlegrounds to see which moderators can wield the site’s rules more effectively to revert edits they don’t want on the page. On a long enough timeframe, community projects are at high risk of turning into fiefdoms for power hungry moderators.

The younger people grow up seemingly seeing the same things, but having a different experience about what it means. Talk to any younger generation gamer and they’ll have stories about Discord or Minecraft communities collapsing under power tripping moderators. But in the newer world where internet resources are cheap and now that LLMs can help migrate things, they may have established a new Discord or moved the community to a new game server by the end of the week. Their favorite game emulator or other project may have been forked 4 times already and the community will move to another fork again at the first signs of the new maintainer not doing what they like.