Like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc or Verne Troyer
Back when Reddit was still a frontier, rather than a mostly-empty liquor cabinet, a new kind of thing started happening. Celebrities, or perhaps more conservatively, people of some note– the Wikipediaed class– were posting under their own names. Even if you didn’t really care about Verne Troyer, you may have been tickled to see him respond “hi there,” to a comment you made about Mini Me.
I do not begrudge Verne, may his memory be a blessing, for what came next. What followed was not the result of any one person’s presence, but of a shift in what the space and others like it began to reward. Recognition slowly replaced contribution. Familiarity displaced curiosity; it wasn’t long before shared online spaces could no longer comfortably accommodate the truly interesting.
When Verne made himself known– made himself at home, it was not any intentional act but his very presence which dislodged a keystone of the web as a wild, unsupervised forum. Though his activity could only be organic, that did not mean it could not be replicated, and so it was.
Massive, shared public online spaces still exist, but in a reduced form. The incentives for the users and platforms have changed, and a structural change followed. To crib gaming terminology, we used to have something that more resembled a shared open world, but personalized algorithmically-served content has moved us into a more instanced online world. So instead of everyone more or less getting “whatever people think is interesting”, it's “what the machine thinks is interesting to you.”
Years ago, I worked briefly at a bar dominated by a cadre of regulars who, though reasonably affable, ruled the space with an iron fist. To take the stool third from the service station while Paul ran back to the office to check in on whatever it was he did for work, would be to attempt a junta.
Those regulars were reasonably cool, but became inextricably intertwined with the environment inside the bar. At times and over time, the bar would feel like it centered around them. They were so comfortable and so accepted in that environment, that it began to adapt to them. What had once been a shared space became someone’s living room.
When I signed up for a casual after-work softball league I was paired up with 14 former baseball players from the University of Michigan. They were extremely comfortable with one another. That was great for them, but less-great for me and the other two people on the team who had signed up to, you know, play softball and drink beer.
The events described in the song Tom's Diner are charming so long as they only happen once. But if every time you went in the guy behind the counter stopped pouring your coffee halfway because he had to go make out with his girlfriend, you might start to doubt whether this is really a diner anymore.