Is the future of social media private messaging/communities?

Thank goodness we killed off all of those troublesome small forums and communities that weren't full of advertising or roaming psychopaths, in favor of the splendid experience offered by the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

Toooootally worth it. /s

I hope that people have learned a simple fact: megacommunities can't be effectively moderated, a place like HN probably represents the upper end of how many active users a site can tolerate and still be worth visiting. A place like Reddit is more or less just an open sewer by comparison, and it's hard to imagine a way to change that at scale.

Small communities share aims and tastes, individuals can stand out and be dealt with if needed, and an affordable amount of human moderation can handle spam and bad actors. Twitter, FB, Reddit and all of those giants are too big to work, and that's why they're full of such miserable people shouting at each other.

Is the future of social media private messaging?

Probably. Even that is too distracting for me. I prefer email.

Interesting confirmation of my opinion that nothing has changed since invention of email.