Well you're going to have a hard to reasoning about it when you stick with the predator/prey, attention economy, zero-sum game analogies. A man running a site cataloging ancient internally generated IBM typeset documents... what higher unstunted form is he aspiring to - despite the machinations of unshriveled fish?
The game is Attention. Focus. Discoverability. Relevance. Impact.
All are inherently rivalrous
Even discounting any financial returns, howling into the void / winking in the dark fails to accomplish anything if there is no receiver or audience.
Ms. Typeset might be engaging in a form of personal journaling or meditation, but in a world that has so many competing distractions her curation is never shared, or even where perhaps it is but the potential community of interest, and the discovery tools possibly reaching it, are fractured and distracted to the point of dissolution ... the effort to communicate and gains of doing so are lost.
Mind that large audiences really aren't communities -- I'm talking Facebook or national broadcast scale. As Dave Winer observed, conversation doesn't scale very well. Dialogue between two people is its most intense form, and past a handfull of participants or so, what remains is mostly a set of serial monologues. Above 15 or so, the graph starts trending increasingly to a star, with one broadcaster and numerous recievers, collectively an audience. At sufficient scale, selling that audience to those who'd hope to advert its attention to their own message becomes a principle commercialisation model. The baiting message tends to the minimum viable common basis.
At extreme levels of specialisation, such as, say, aa maths PhD, the relevant community might easily fit in a small classroom. Possibly in a single car. My cursory analysis of Google+ communities by size and activity levels suggests diminishing returns above about 10,000 registered members, of whom perhaps 1--10% were highly active, so 100--1,000 participants, roughly within Dunbar's Number range. Extremely large groups are visible but not especially useful --- most seemed overrun with spam and memes.
Pursuit of that audience tends strongly to sacrifice or ignore nuanced, specialist, or niche interests, to the point of actively trying to steer potential members of such groups to the larger, and more monetisable, vulgar pool.
My own seeking of expressive outlets is an increasingly frustrating trade-off between the expressivity of the tools themselves (mostly formatting and media capabilities), technical hosting issues, audience discovery and cultivation, search, and related concerns. I'm hoping to learn, share, and discover. The sense that this used to be more viable back in the days when I used Usenet and mailing lists may be a Golden Age illusion, but its a damnedably persistent one.
So I'll just assume that you intended to answer the question, and that your response contains your strongest argument. From what I can tell, the only complaint that makes sense is with regard to community building platforms splintering potential collaborators/readers. I can somewhat agree with that, but it has absolutely nothing to do with an attention economy or corporate market capture. I can't think of a time that I was searching for something related to an interest, but instead got trapped in a dead Yahoo discussion board - hypnotized by erectile dysfunction spam. I just blast right through and eventually end up on some dude's blog with a tilde in the url, on more than one occasion this has ended up as a back and forth over email where we both come out ahead. Now I'll admit that my interests aren't mainstream, and I may not be in touch with the average consumer... but their interests are mainstream - so they are by default already catered to.
it has absolutely nothing to do with an attention economy or corporate market capture.
I disagree strongly. My complaints are not merely theoretical. Addressed in the Reddit post below and the three internally-linked articles. That subreddit itself is a failed experiment at community-building and fostering. One of several. (There's also been the rare modest success.)
There was a time that intelligent conversation was ... reasonably easy to find online. You'd head to the appropriate Usenet group, later an email list, or, for a time, Slashdot.
Hacker News seems to be about as close to that as I can find at the moment. It has numerous flaws, and it definitely has its own niche. The moderation philosophy is excellent and the practice nearly always lives up to the goals.
I came to have a strong appreciation for the site by voicing disagreements to dang, generally in email, and though I sometimes disagree with specific decisions, the actions which are made are in general fair and serve the site's goals. The increasing politicisation over the past four-plus years has clearly been problematic, but HN's breasting of that surge has been largely admirable. Not that the occasional thread doesn't fall flat, and not that there aren't rampant attempts at manipulation. But as a whole, and compared to other platforms, the bottom's not fallen out, and the site's not become a complete cesspit.
Usenet was small. I've a copy of John Quarterman's The Matrix, an overview of online conversation forums and networks published in 1990 (it covers Usenet, it does not include WWW or Gopher). That includes DEC's estimates of Usenet activity. The total population with access was ~880,000, and I believe fewer than 150,000 active participants (posting activity). HN alone, a minuscule site by modern standards, is roughly comparable in size (precise statistics don't seem available, though this is my general understanding).
Usenet also had high barriers to entry, though based largely on interest and aptitude (by way of university campus access) rather than market-based rationing. Campus-based administration also helped moderate behaviour, though more overt mechanisms had to be developed with time, and ultimately Usenet could not scale to the hygenic-controls needs of a multimillion-user network, on several fronts, so discussion migrated elsewhere. (Yes, a tiny fraction remains on Usenet, but for all intents, it's dead, Jim. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...)
It's not that you get trapped in some ED mutual admiration society. It's that the folks trying to launch or join an earnest discussion ... often cannot.
I think we've got a pretty fundamental difference on what we're looking for in a community. But we seem to agree on one thing - the political dimension has worsened things (well beyond the point that I'd have thought would occur before a general outcry for a return to sanity curtailed the destruction). And to further extend that thought, I would certainly agree with anyone who suggested that commercial or otherwise centralized platforms are not only uniquely vulnerable to political shenanigans - but magnify the 2nd order damage. Things are going to be getting a lot worse on that front before they get any better. As someone who was involved with bitcoin when the community was 90% crypto-anarchists, I'm keenly aware of what a community looks like when it is tearing itself apart - and what it looks like when it is under assault. It'll be interesting to see how much further things go, because few people outside of the early crypto community have experienced de-banking, and socially conscious market indexes are being rolled out...
Yes, we can agree on that political element being destructive (though might start diverging on the mechanisms ... I'll spare the long ramble here).
I do fundamentally believe that markets and information goods are a poor match. Attempts to "market it harder" to fix news, academic publishing, ratings, community, and most of all, conversation, seem to be a category error. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...
Advertising seems remarkably pernicious, particular in its adtech instantiation.
Just people randomly stumbling in with zero interest in the subject? Or people who had previously been captured by a rival typeset historian backed by a powerful multinational commercial interest? Because one of those is a search engine problem and the other is a goofy attention economy based concern.
