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The point is the size of the audience - there's usually more people in any given reddit forum than in your average coffee shop :) And _that_ is caused by a qua

• jacques_chester 15y ago
  Yes, but physical proximity has been steadily growing less important for thousands of years. It used to be that you needed to convince Ugg, the big man of your tribe. Then you had to travel to Babylon -- or instead send clay tablets. Then you could be heard in Alexandria from Rome if papyrus copies of your words were transcribed and shipped. Eventually the printing press, telegraph and regular steam train schedules meant information about your speech in Paris could be news in Berlin in hours. Today, in a few seconds, I put my hypothesis on the nature of the internet to a few hundred strangers scattered across the globe. That's what I mean by a quantitative change. At each step, the number of people you could potentially reach has increased; the cost of doing so has fallen. I don't see it as a qualitative change, though, I see it as a series of smaller stepwise improvements.