An inter­est­ing pro­file of a niche com­mu­ni­ty affect­ed by the shift of atten­tion from community-led sites to Face­book, “How Face­book – the Wal-Mart of the inter­net – dis­man­tled online sub­cul­tures.”

Over time, these chal­lenges to the BME com­mu­ni­ty became increas­ing­ly prob­lem­at­ic. Mem­bers delet­ed accounts or stopped post­ing. By 2015, the main com­mu­ni­ty forum – which used to have hun­dreds of posts a day – went with­out a sin­gle com­ment for over six months.

Hav­ing pre­dict­ed many of the web’s func­tions and fea­tures, BME failed to antic­i­pate its own demise.

It’s def­i­nite­ly some­thing I’ve seen in my niche world of Quak­ers. I start­ed Quak­erQuak­er as an inde­pen­dent site in part because I didn’t want Google and Face­book and Beliefnet to deter­mine who we are. There’s the obvi­ous prob­lems — Beliefnet hir­ing a pro­gram­mer to make a “What Reli­gion Are You?” test based on a few books picked up the library one afternoon.

But there’s also more sub­tle prob­lems. On Face­book any­one can start or join a group and start talk­ing author­i­ta­tive­ly about Quak­ers with­out actu­al­ly being an active com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber. I can think of a num­ber of online char­ac­ters who had nev­er even vis­it­ing a Friends meet­ing or church.

Our tra­di­tion built up ways of defin­ing our spokes­peo­ple though the prac­tices of record­ed min­is­ters and elders, and of clar­i­fy­ing shared beliefs though doc­u­ments like Faith and Prac­tice. I’ll be the first to argue that this process has pro­duced mixed results. But if it is to be adapt­ed or reformed, I’d like the work to be done by us in a thought­ful, inclu­sive man­ner. Instead, the form of our dis­cus­sions are now invis­i­bly imposed by an out­side algo­rithm that is opti­mized for obses­sive engage­ment and adver­tis­ing deliv­ery. Face­book process is not Quak­er process, yet it is large­ly what we use when we talk about Quak­ers out­side of Sun­day morning.

I think Face­book has helped alter­na­tive com­mu­ni­ties form. I’m grate­ful for the pop-up com­mu­ni­ties of inter­est I’m part of. And there are sites with more user gen­er­at­ed con­tent like Wikipedia and Red­dit that hold an inter­est­ing middle-ground and where infor­ma­tion is gen­er­al­ly more accu­rate. But there’s still a crit­i­cal role for self-organized inde­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tions, a niche that I think is con­tin­u­ing to be over­shad­owed in our cur­rent atten­tion ecosystem.

How Face­book – the Wal-Mart of the inter­net – dis­man­tled online subcultures 

Even though Face­book claims to be a glob­al com­mu­ni­ty, its rise has come at the expense of online…

The Conversation