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Re:It's not just you – no one is posting on social media any... by VancouverMan on Thursday August 31, 2023 @01:49PM (#37341072)
I don't see any real difference between your "online pub" and globalized-entity "pedestrian street" examples.

They're both highly-controlled and highly-curated venues.

Environments like those just encourage conformity. That, in turn, results in interaction/discussion that's rather bland, homogeneous, and sterile.

I definitely find this site to be like that. The "showdead" setting very slightly mitigates it, but even then, I almost never find any sort of truly thought-provoking discussion here.

Those venues seem to exhibit a false sense of community to me. There's interaction, but the participants are either ruthlessly conforming, or they're walking on eggshells.

Re:It's not just you – no one is posting on social media any... by OkayPhysicist on Thursday August 31, 2023 @07:11PM (#37344768)
The only way communities work is if people engage in some level of self-policing with regards to their behavior. Sites that fail to keep the kind of community necessary for people to largely self-police end up requiring top-down policing, or descend into cesspits.