The Red Eye and, you know, stuff

I have a request currently in to set up the Red Eye as a group on DeviantArt, having very rapidly given up on doing so on WritersCafe for reasons that have nothing to do with my perception of the demand for a group about fiction set late at night. I have reason to doubt that WritersCafe will exist for very much longer. If one goes to the listing of new groups, one finds, as of this afternoon, spam groups - groups created explicitly to sell consumer goods and services - piled thick in the first 61 pages of a listing that only runs out to 100 pages, showing the 2000 newest groups. Not surprisingly, growth in the new groups has been anemic. Who is going to climb over 60 pages of spam in order to get to the real new groups? The owner, having been contacted, refused to take action or even respond. Discussing the problem in the forum, I mentioned that I had created a group for the announcement of new groups, and that unlike the new groups listing, this group would be aggressively cleared of all spam. I then reminded those present that the spammers would eventually find their way into the forum, and that now was the time to do some networking, before the forum ceased to be usable as a means of communication.

Have you ever, in a conversation, had that moment when you suddenly knew that nobody was home, or at least, nobody was going to admit to being home? Somebody had a vague concern that I was trying to destroy all of the evil people on the Internet, and somebody else wanted me to put down the pitchfork and stop storming the Bastille. The response of the regulars to a direct, tangible threat to their community, was to shut down any attempt to deal with the threat, by acting so insanely that the discussion could not continue. Through their actions, they showed that they had decided to destroy their own community. There is no other way to see this. If the house is burning down, and people are blocking somebody as he goes to put out the fire, the only logical conclusion is that they're trying to see to it that the house will burn down. I had, as I told the people there, seen some truly dysfunctional communities, but this was a first. I had never seen a community fight to die, like this.

As I looked around the groups I had joined, finding this all very very strange, I noticed that while there was a substantial body of writing already present, it almost all dated to 2010 or earlier. I had already become aware of a massive data loss incident that had come a few years earlier (2008), which had wiped out almost all of the work submitted to that network. I had also found record of a contest that started in late January of that year - almost four years ago, at this point - begun by the company in an attempt to refill the site, promising cash prizes to those submitting the three stories judged to be the best. As of today, the contest was still listed as being in the process of being decided. Mention was made of the disappearance of almost the entire adult user base. As I said in the forum there, the time had come to do triage.

It was just too much. Management didn't care, the regulars were working to obstruct any effort to fix the problem, the damage already done was deep, and the adults who had departed had excellent reasons to not want to return. The time had come to give up. I congratulated the remaining regulars in the forum on the splendid job they did of destroying their own community, downloaded a few discussions on the board, and left. I haven't cut my links to WritersCafe, yet, but this is only because I have stuff to do. I will get to them, sooner or later, and they will be cut.

I had entertained the thought of telling people in the forums here to expect a wave of people from WritersCafe, for about half of a second, but I doubt that wave is going to come. The sad news is that the building of these communities is not always a zero sum game. Sometimes, we just lose people, because the whole idea of social networking has started to take on a bad odor.  People will often come to expect the worst, and with fairly good reason, or even if they don't expect the worst, can become so tired that they don't care about any good expectations. They just want this miserable experience they just had to be over, and whatever they had to give is lost to the rest of us. Let enough potential users be burned and burned out in this way, and eventually, even if the next entrepeneur who comes by really would have created the most wonderful network imaginable, given a chance, it won't matter, because he won't have a market to sell his idea to. It will have been used up, and that really would be a shame.

I see my request has been approved. At least one network still bothers to function.