I was browsing my old posts on /r/DebateAnarchism from more than ten years ago. I wouldn’t have described myself as a troll back then but I did get satisfaction out of upsetting the board’s members with quasi-fascistic takes.
On one such occasion, a user complained that my flair was inflammatory and that I ought to be banned from the board as a disingenuous interlocutor. I clicked on this user’s profile and saw that (more than ten years after this exchange occurred) they were actively commenting on /r/redscarepod and had been doing so for years.
I’ve had this happen before with other forums; I used to think that the internet was a big place, but increasingly I’ve come to believe that for any given niche, there are probably only a few thousand people worldwide who will care to comment on it with enough frequency that you ever come across their posts. There were probably less than 500 users who drove the majority of the discussions on /r/anarcho_capitalism. The number was probably even smaller on similar pages. I had good intuitions back then but was poorly-read, so I never really thought of myself as participating in anything significant at the time, but when I look back now, a lot of the ideas we discussed in those niche forums ended up in the wider zeitgeist. I used to think these sorts of forums were just a small percentage of people who were interested in a given subject, but I’ve since come to think that a lot of these places online are not auxiliary spaces merely facilitating discussions between an online subset of a community that already exists somewhere in the real world, but that the forums are instead creative engines where a minority of users engage in discussion, with the conclusions drawn by these users then radiating out into broader audiences that only discuss the issues in the “real world” once they’ve seen the discussions online.
On one such occasion, a user complained that my flair was inflammatory and that I ought to be banned from the board as a disingenuous interlocutor. I clicked on this user’s profile and saw that (more than ten years after this exchange occurred) they were actively commenting on /r/redscarepod and had been doing so for years.
I’ve had this happen before with other forums; I used to think that the internet was a big place, but increasingly I’ve come to believe that for any given niche, there are probably only a few thousand people worldwide who will care to comment on it with enough frequency that you ever come across their posts. There were probably less than 500 users who drove the majority of the discussions on /r/anarcho_capitalism. The number was probably even smaller on similar pages. I had good intuitions back then but was poorly-read, so I never really thought of myself as participating in anything significant at the time, but when I look back now, a lot of the ideas we discussed in those niche forums ended up in the wider zeitgeist. I used to think these sorts of forums were just a small percentage of people who were interested in a given subject, but I’ve since come to think that a lot of these places online are not auxiliary spaces merely facilitating discussions between an online subset of a community that already exists somewhere in the real world, but that the forums are instead creative engines where a minority of users engage in discussion, with the conclusions drawn by these users then radiating out into broader audiences that only discuss the issues in the “real world” once they’ve seen the discussions online.