How the Internet Currently Tries to get Smaller

Following up on our post ‘How Private Communities Compete With Open Social Networks‘, the strong-worded essay from The Verge ‘The year we wanted the internet to be smaller‘ provides another interesting viewpoint.

Tiredness and disappointment from Facebook, twitter and the web giants, their limitations and drawbacks, suspicion of political manipulation etc. push people away to test new, smaller networks. “We can see this longing for community — and specifically, the sort of small, weird communities that populated and defined the early internet — everywhere.” According to the essay, community email lists also reappear with a strong appeal to create small groups of like minded people.

I am convinced this is the expression of discontent on the way some of those social networks are behaving, and that eventually there will be some rules imposed from a regulatory perspective to resolve those issues. There will always be a balancing act between large global networks and smaller closed communities. We need both to respond to our needs, and both will continue to exist one way or the other.