Forum was my first love too. I agree that individualism web appeals to a lot more people. And yes, most people still use internet for recreation purposes only.

Forum was my first love too. I agree that individualism web appeals to a lot more people. And yes, most people still use internet for recreation purposes only. But that's changing. My understanding of individualism and collectivism is that they are not two separate entities. In fact, they feed on each other. For example, let's look at this "evolution" 1. Lots of people experiment with individual expression on live journal (or whatever was popular back then) 2. Good writers get more attention, bad writers drop out 3. Some of the better writers get so many traffic that they decide to open independent blogs 4. The best of the blogs always serve critical functionality for the community (consciously or not). Either by delivering valuable information, e.g. news, or by (virtual) bringing people together, e.g. comic strips. When I look at this evolutionarily, it just makes sense to me. Humans are collective animals. We know that one of the main reasons that collectivism works so well is because of Divisions of Labor. Interestingly, at the core of Division of Labor is the requirement that everyone takes on a specialized and often unique role, which is very individualistic. Thus it is important to work towards the "few but better blogs" kind of collectivism-individualism system. I'm pretty confident that on a larger time-scale, the internet is going in that direction. At least for myself, I enjoy a well organized forum a lot more than having 400+ facebook friends.