I just wanted to take the time out and comment on your article today. I'm definitely guilty of being one of the “drive-by downloaders” that you've talked about. Not that I don't appreciate your work or find it useful but that I didn't feel I had anything to useful to contribute.
VFE is highly useful tool that I'm sure a lot of developers are using, even if they don't take the time out to thank you. I'd love to be able to use it, but as someone just trying to get started in the world of web development, I haven't had the opportunity to (yet). Darkcraft looked appealing to me as a huge Minecraft fan, but I wanted to wait till it was finished before jumping in. Now that you've abandoned work, I'm definitely going to look at what you managed to create when I get the time.
I'll wrap this ramble up by saying, I can't wait to see what projects you create next and I'll actively make more of an effort to take part in this community and any projects you work on. I doubt I'll be able to offer any help with coding but hopefully my opinion or ideas will be enough.
I’m not trying to guilt trip everybody into doing things they don’t want to. I am publicly exploring my thoughts and decisions. I appreciate greatly that you’ll come here and write something, you can never know what the result might be.
I'd also like to comment on the article and say that we're all too quick to lay the blame on social networks. It's not just them. Many places on the internet that used to be about building a community have changed in one way or another.
Github (and others) took away a lot of the community around open source projects. I no longer try to join the development team of a project I want to be involved in: I just fork and make my changes. I don't even really have to bother to try to get those changes accepted anymore; if the author doesn't accept them I just maintain my own branch and fork back in his/her changes.
The whole concept of blogs really kills online _conversation_. By default, a blog talks _at_ people, not with them. The comment threads are the only place where conversation could happen, and those generally consist of "great post" posts, people talking _at_ the author/article/others, or straight flaming.
I'd like to say social networks killed IRC, but I fear IRC killed itself. I've found it incredibly hard to find good *conversation* on any IRC network/channel, even one's run locally like irc.757.org.
Mailing lists still thrive in places, but see IRC above.
So when you ask where the community went, I don't think "social networks killed it" is a sufficient answer. The answer is probably more like "the community died because we stopped giving a shit." From what I've seen the people who still care about community are few and far between on the web, and few and far between is the opposite of community.
Kroc, I'm not saying you're _blaming_ social networks (or any other site/service) for the fall of the community, but I am saying that we _can't_ blame them. No one forced me to use GitHub to host my projects, but it's free an easy and I'm too lazy to do better. I failed at finding a community of programmers to work on my projects with me and I _just. gave. up. trying._
So as I sit here and cry (figuratively) over the death of online community, I really have no one to blame but myself. I've spent the past 3 years lurking; I rarely participate; I gave up trying to build a community and typically dismiss the idea as futile rather than join others who try to do so.
I’m not blaming social networks. They were one example in my article—an example I use because of the commercial backing which will not decline in the near-term. I’m completely on the same lines as you.
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Your friendly neighbourhood moderators:
Kroc, Impressed, Martijn
