Pretty much all of the social problems of the current internet come down either to 1) scale or 2) lack of boundaries between spaces.
One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is the division between participants and audience.
Imagine a moderately popular band. The overwhelming majority of their fans - the ones who listen to their music or go to their concerts - are not going to be a part of the band’s social scene, or even necessarily active participants in the subculture the band is a part of. Active participants in anything like that will necessarily always be vastly outnumbered by casual audience members. This is important - it makes it possible to know who’s in your social space and have a sense of the dynamics happening between them. Not everyone who likes a band is going to fit in with the crowd they hang out with - and that’s how it should be.
For any artist who gets their start on social media, there is no separation between audience members and participants - their social sphere is theoretically inclusive of everyone on their social media site of choice. This creates all sorts of serious problems for the social dynamics of everyone involved. Participants in a subculture need to carve out their own (smaller) ecosystems off of social media!
Also, relatedly, the overwhelming majority of users of any publicly accesible website will always, inevitably, be lurkers (or functionally lurkers in the case of people who use Tumblr solely to reblog posts.) This is normal and to be expected. In all situations, participants are vastly outnumbered by audience, because participating takes effort and people have other stuff they could be doing instead.
