While this article doesn’t really seem to be hitting what I am about to say, I think someone on HN a while back described a related phenomenon (which leads to the same issue) really well. The Internet is Balkanizing. This is hardly a new concept but they were drilling down specifically into online communities.

People are electing to not freely share information on public forums like they used to. They are retreating into discord and other services where they can put down motes and raise the draw bridges. And who can blame them? So many forums and social media sites and forums are engaging in increasingly hostile design and monetization processes, AI/LLM’s are crawling everywhere vacuuming up everything then putting them behind paywalls and ruining the original sources’ abilities to be found in search, algorithms designed to create engagement foster vitriol and controversy, the list goes on. HN is a rare exception these days.

So what happens? A bunch of people with niche interests or knowledge sets congregate into private communities and only talk to each other. Which makes it harder for new people to join. It’s a sad state of affairs if you ask me.