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I agree, you can build a movement based on community and doing things for the love of it. Allowing everyone in comes later and is for mainly for growth and prof
by chippy 5y ago
I agree, you can build a movement based on community and doing things for the love of it. Allowing everyone in comes later and is for mainly for growth and profitability and usually is when we see this earlier community fracturing. That's when these websites grow bigger and bigger and start to monetize because people will not cooperate freely for nothing anymore. Commerce replace community but a community comes first and is rewarded. Commerce rewards also, in more obvious material ways.
- jka 5y agoThanks, that's a good observation of traditional (online?) community evolution. It seems like software could potentially be a little different though, given zero-cost-of-copy, zero-cost-of-communication, and zero barriers (other than social inertia) to learning, inspection, modification and contribution of code. Perhaps sufficiently-sized communities require fragmentation in order to function effectively (it certainly happens within large organizations) - that happens fairly naturally already with software projects too, though, so there may not necessarily be a scalability or community-size limit concern there.