alt Hacker NewsA bit of a tangent, but it's fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community. I would like to see a collection of such anecdotes, but I can see why it doesn't get compiled, because it would essentially just be [description of community] and then [Facebook], with no specifically interesting thing to report other than "it petered out". Same for Amazon, come to think of it. You can describe what used to be, and that it's now longer there, but there isn't really any compelling tale in it.
> fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community
There's an analogy here to suffocating in an anoxic atmosphere.
Our bodies don't sense blood oxygen well. Instead, our urge to breathe is mainly driven by dissolved CO2 [1]. So if you're breathing out CO2, and breathing in no O2, your alarm bells stay mostly silent. Your lights go out without your ever being wiser.
Analogously, I think our social senses trigger when we've been away from people we care for. We get that "I haven't seen so and so in a while" urge, which in turn drives reaching out.
The problem is that sense seems almost like a proximity timer. If we've interacted in any way with so and so, it resets. A threshold which appears to be met by e.g. liking a photo on Facebook–empty calories of social interaction. A nitrogen atmosphere giving the perception of normalcy while everything slowly decays. And then, at a moment nobody notices until it's passed, the social rot sets in and a former community is now folks who once knew each other.
It petered out.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515048/#b21