How do we democratize internet communities?

Question

Online communities often fall into hands of few people that can maintain control indefinitely with no one having enough power to challenge their authority.It's impossible to fork a community without large enough following.Also the original community still has the advantage of being the "default one" where all the searches and references will lead you to.

jschveibinz · Accepted Answer

We are living through a huge social experiment where one voice can easily reach hundreds if not thousands of people in a matter of minutes. It is important to remember that this is unprecedented. Never before have individuals had this power. In the past you could stand on a box with a bullhorn, if you had a permit or the backing of hundreds or thousands of like-minded followers. Or, you could write a letter to the editor, and your editorial might get printed. But only after careful consideration.
The fact that now anyone can speak to a large audience by typing in a few random thoughts with no challenge or editing is a very radical change to public speech. I suspect that there will always need to be some form of “filtering” required even with our new media for speech. I love free speech, but humans are fallible.
The mechanism for editing this new type of speech is a work in progress. I agree that improvements are needed. It’s a big responsibility.

arkitaip · Answer

I have never experienced this as a problem myself. What I've often seen, however, is that online communities stagnate or die because their audience gets older and no new members are recruited, because they are too coupled to a specific legacy software, etc.

beforeolives · Answer

> It's impossible (...) without large enough following.Seems democratized enough to me.