There's a bifurcation of goals in modern platforms, where traditional forums (with their smaller, niche communitites) only catered to one of those goals. The c

There's a bifurcation of goals in modern platforms, where traditional forums (with their smaller, niche communitites) only catered to one of those goals. The common goal is community. You have a small gaming forum and you're talking with your gaming friends about strategies and mods and maps you've made and you connect over the shared interest. The new goal is commercial. By writing sufficiently engaging content or understanding how to play the algorithms, or how to play the memes you can expand your reach/influence/follower-count. Now your writing is a private marketing channel. The other side of the commercial goal "coin" is the idea of discovery. There are lots of people looking for new things to read, and these are the people that commercial goals are trying to get in front of. Things like the "endless feed" cater exclusively to discovery/commercial goals. FYI: I'm working on an open-source self-hosted private blogging system called Haven[1] that explicitly excludes discoverability and commercial as goals. [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org