The Disappearance of Social Cohesion Online - The Death of Community

Social Cohesion, on a fundamental level, is needed for any type of community to form and maintain itself - regardless of it's size, shape, or citizenry.

Social Cohesion is how well a group of people can stick together when the going gets tough - or even when nothing's happening, Social Cohesion is when people don't go for each other's throats out of boredom. For any type of community to exist - there has to be some level of Social Cohesion, or the whole damned thing goes belly up.

There is no Social Cohesion in 99% of online communities - and this is why there are no true communities online anymore.

Have you tried joining a "community" of any kind established in the last 8 years? The majority of them are not actually "communities" as much as they are a few hot shots and their gaggles of sycophants - digital cults of personalities, e-celeb churches and cult compounds. This amount of weight placed on one person's shoulders is a grievous folly - heavy is the head that wears the crown, and were I Damocles I would abdicate at once to get away from that sword - anyone at the top of a food chain is going to mess up majorly a handful of times in their life and this is just a given - none of the followers of these false idols see that as possible though.

Time and time again we've seen people - big people online - millions of subscribers, thousands of dollars in the bank, sponsored by a dozen companies - have all that thrown away either through their nefarious deeds coming to light, by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time on twitter or a livestream, or even by the mere allegation of wrongdoing at the right time.

So what happens when you have several communities online which are only capable of sustaining themselves by worshipping these figureheads - and then those figureheads inevitably fall like all the rest? Well, you get chaos. Everyone scatters like fucking rats - everyone acts surprised, some of the dumber ones actually are. There's a whole rigmarole - other e-celebs get in on the action under the belief that by positioning themselves as "not a criminal like that other guy" they could scrape some of the audience off and enhance their numbers - servers, subreddits, and stan accounts, all go quiet overnight and rot over the coming years - you've seen it all before.

Then they move somewhere else, and they begin worshipping another Golden Calf, and the cycle repeats itself. A portion of the people who were fooled by the last guy decide that they won't be fooled again and become hypervigilant, calling out any perceived wrongdoing - be it major or slight in their eyes - and they, many times, serve as the catalyst for another e-celeb's downfall. It's a vicious but predicatable cycle.

At this point, I don't care to find out which came first - or if I'm putting the cart before the horse. I can't ascertain whether the issue of e-celeb worship is at the center of the issue - or if the reactions and quick spread of information are at the center - but it's clear that the two work in tandem with each other and that they're clearly destructive to online socialization as a whole.

Downstream of the issue of e-celeb worship is how it affects the up and coming figureheads of all things online. A kid grows up online, he sees the rise and fall of hundreds of people who "used to be cool", he decides he's gonna do everything in his power to not be them when he "makes it big" and "gets out of the hood". So he lies, he cultivates a personality that attracts people who would never in a million years cosign any aspect of his real personality, who would never laugh at the jokes he finds funny, never enjoy the music or media that he does, who would never see him as human if he weren't actively lying to their faces on every platform at once. Then, he slips up - maybe he says too much, maybe he says too little, maybe he says something a little more aggressively than he needs to, hell - maybe he doesn't say or do anything and someone else just accuses him of doing so - the masses that he's herded turn against him, and when revealed for who he is genuinely - he has little to no support structure left, and is cannibalized by his former followers.

One or two big controversies is all it takes in an age where information spreads at breakneck speeds for someone's 15 minutes of fame to end. Put simply - whether it's downstream or upstream I do not know - but there are numerous, blatant, issues with the way that "communities" function on 99% of the Internet, and until those problems are dealt with there will be people at each other's throats constantly.