Agreed. The trick is, how do you leverage, or get around, network effects without destroying the community? Network effects create the problem, but are built in to the medium itself.

< But you can make it so that they're in a corner of the Internet, because everyone's in some corner of the Internet somewhere. We kinda had that in the 200x's and late 1990s. It mostly worked.

Youth is always sunny, but those days certainly seemed better. There was a meta-community of people just wanting to grow the internet, so everyone at least had that shared goal in common. I get that feeling here on HN for the most part.