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I think some of it is a size issue. Reddit is so large that even a single forum on Reddit can have 15K followers, and you never get to know anyone. In the old forums, you’d have maybe 2K users, and you get to know them fairly well, and enjoy hearing what people I actually sort of know think about things. Or get advice from someone I know and have some sense of where the advice comes from. On bigger corporate forums, it’s less talking about an issue and more *decamping the reply button to get a short pithy response in that might, maybe be read but that would not get a response. In bigger places you shout into a void, you don’t really have a conversation.
On one hand, that's a good point. Arguably the whole rise of the Influencer was an attempt to keep some sort of a structure in the discourse, given the amount of people involved. In some weird neo-feudalist fashion, people pick their champions, pledge to serve them, and the champions make their case / fight it out with other champions. OTOH, it's not like you can't lean into "shouting into the void" at high volume, this is how 4chan works(/ed) as far as I can tell, and it generated a lot of interesting things too.
4chan is on the extreme end of a communal activity, which is probably too much for my liking, and you're right that the kind of communities I enjoy would have to be on the smaller side.
I think we can agree on that. Influencers are not so much about their fans per se but mostly an avatar for a movement that attempts to publicly dunk on the other side either by arguments or slick presentation or by making your side feel more glamorous or cool. I watch Vaush a good bit and it seems like his niche is to try to put a nerdy face on left leaning politics. Others are trying to put a posh face on right leaning politics. Or whatever the case may be, the influencer is mostly involved in packaging the idea in ways that appeal to different audiences. If you want leftism in nerd-face, you want Vaush among others. If you want right wing nerd-face, it’s Mentis-Wave and that sphere.
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