Ignoring the massive concentration of fucked up gender issues in that article, I do find it interesting how sites develop these very clear cultures and how quickly.
I recently came into an Ello account, and ultimately found myself put off by the place; there's nothing about the software that's that offputting (other than the overlarge sidebar), but I look around at who and what is on it and I feel out of place. The whole site seems to be populated entirely by 'modern artist' types and little else.
Similarly, G+ very quickly wound up being a go to for tech and general nerdery, but little else (perhaps just because no one else cared about the sales pitch).
Some of this of course is down to founder curation of a sort, Ello is run by artists so of course it being invite only meant they mostly invited more artists, while G+'s earliest adopters were Google coders and employees.
But the latter was certainly the case for Twitter as well, and it managed to claw past that reputation, just as Facebook clawed its way past its early rep for 'that place for college kids to play Scrabble'.
I wonder how one even goes about controlling or managing this kind of culture shift, and if one even should.
Orkut, which became largely Brazilian, is the classic example. There were some good articles about how that arose but cant find them (maybe the dead link from http://tech.slashdot.org/story/04/07/17/2243232/language-tem... ?). In that case it was partly about language initially, Google allowed mixed languages in threads, and Portuguese put off the English speakers but not so much the other way round.
I think that was part of what was brilliant about facebook. They gradually went from restricted to Ivy league universities, to restricted to people with an .edu domain to open to everyone. When I was still in high school I used a facebook clone by some local company restricted to high school students. The same company had equivalent sites for university students and the general public, once facebook became generally available outside the US they rapidly lost market share. At that point facebook was still considered "cool" in my social circle because it was the place where american university students hung out.
I recently came into an Ello account, and ultimately found myself put off by the place; there's nothing about the software that's that offputting (other than the overlarge sidebar), but I look around at who and what is on it and I feel out of place. The whole site seems to be populated entirely by 'modern artist' types and little else.
Similarly, G+ very quickly wound up being a go to for tech and general nerdery, but little else (perhaps just because no one else cared about the sales pitch).
Some of this of course is down to founder curation of a sort, Ello is run by artists so of course it being invite only meant they mostly invited more artists, while G+'s earliest adopters were Google coders and employees.
But the latter was certainly the case for Twitter as well, and it managed to claw past that reputation, just as Facebook clawed its way past its early rep for 'that place for college kids to play Scrabble'.
I wonder how one even goes about controlling or managing this kind of culture shift, and if one even should.