> Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators
Right, but you don't know these people. You're not in a community with them. Tao points to Dunbar's number as a rough boundary between small and large communities; how many of these "tiny" creators have fewer than 150 followers, and how many of them foster close social ties among those followers in ways that couldn't scale to a larger audience?
Before the era of ~2k subscriber youtube passion project channels, people were forced to find people in their area with shared interests and establish social clubs. This necessarily meant a smaller audience, but it also meant actually being friends with the people you were communicating with. Youtube is definitely a different kind of thing.
That said, I do think there's an argument to be made that the Discord- and groupchat-ification of the social media ecosystem is a backswing toward smaller groups.
Right, but you don't know these people. You're not in a community with them. Tao points to Dunbar's number as a rough boundary between small and large communities; how many of these "tiny" creators have fewer than 150 followers, and how many of them foster close social ties among those followers in ways that couldn't scale to a larger audience?
Before the era of ~2k subscriber youtube passion project channels, people were forced to find people in their area with shared interests and establish social clubs. This necessarily meant a smaller audience, but it also meant actually being friends with the people you were communicating with. Youtube is definitely a different kind of thing.
That said, I do think there's an argument to be made that the Discord- and groupchat-ification of the social media ecosystem is a backswing toward smaller groups.