I have lived like my entire adult life on the internet, and I have seen some version of a very particular conflict crop up on every single one of them to some degree or another. The instigating topic or pivot point changes, but the dynamic is distressingly consistent, and I think the real question comes down to this:
Is a community about what it does, or is it about the people in it?
In any group of people there's going to be an active and a passive contingent. In the old forum days, we might've called it something like "posters", and "lurkers". In truth, it's not strictly binary, in fact it's often, and ideally, quite fluid. Posters become inactive as they drift away, lurkers get more comfortable and become posters, and so forth.
But at any given time you're gonna have some population of both, and ideally, for a healthy community, you want enough fluidity to account for turnover and keep a lively community. You need a critical mass of posters to keep a site from looking dead.
In online communities this presents a special problem though, that IRL communities don't have: if you're not posting, we don't see you. You can't be the quiet guy in the corner, because in a medium entirely defined by active contribution, the quiet guy effectively doesn't exist. Wallflowers in online spaces defined by posting become wallpaper.
To be clear, that's not a value judgement, it's just kind of an unfortunate consequence of how most online mediums work, outside edge cases like virtual worlds or the like.
But it kinda feels like one, doesn't it? Something in your brain may very well have started gnawing at you as you read this.
People don't like to feel excluded. Marginalized people especially don't like to feel excluded, because we already are, constantly, all the goddamn time, and we also don't want to feel like we're the ones doing the excluding either. That would make us like Them. It's the medium itself that excludes by default, and puts an overly heavy onus on the lurker and not the poster, simply because of this visibility problem.
Now, it's normal for someone to take some time to acclimate to a community, hell in the old days it was kind of expected; gotta take some time to get to know the local culture and know how to act. Ideally a community is welcoming enough, and encouraging enough, that people feel welcome to finally make that first post. If you've built a culture that's accepting of first-timer flubs and is enthusiastic about greeting new people and new contributions, that'll go a long way to helping those lurkers who wish to be posters bridge the gap for the first time.
But communities are communities. Inertia takes hold, culture becomes more concrete, and ritual and familiarity start to drive the bulk of posting. Everyone knows each other, they've all been around for the same jokes, the same events, built a bond. That's part of why you build a community after all! To form bonds with each other! And those bonds and the activities that reinforce them kinda take over the purpose of the community as it goes from that initial phase of seeking community, and into the phase of having built one, and now needing to maintain it.
That transition can seem almost transparent for everyone involved ... at least for the posters.
But for lurkers, whether they just stayed quiet as the community grew, or if they're new to the community, that process of forming bonds ... starts to look more like walls. Its so much more to learn and adapt to now, so much to try to understand, to feel like you can fit into the groove. The vibe and the culture you have built, was built around the people who were active, and so by simple inevitability, it never included the lurkers in its definition of itself. They were invisible the whole time.
Without any intention at all, you've already excluded them from the beginning.
And well ... it still sucks to be excluded, whether it was intentional or not. It's going to upset some people, and eventually, one of them is going to go from lurker to poster, but it's going to be to tell you why.
For the posters, this conflict often feels like an ambush. To them, the community is what it does, and that means posting, just like they always have been. It feels like the very thing that made them come back every day is now suddenly being attacked, and worse, from people who never "contributed" in the first place. The first reaction is very likely to be defensive, to circle the wagons.
Remember: people don't like to feel like they've been excluding anyone, especially if they've experienced exclusion themselves, and now someone they see as a nobody is accusing them of just that. And again, lurking is invisible. Someone might've lurked for years, and in their own way felt a part of the community for all that time, but to the posters they were invisible. It can feel like an attack from the outside. "How dare you tell us what to do, who are you anyway?"
It's an understandable reaction ... but also an unhelpful one as often as not. Just because you didn't know you were excluding someone, doesn't mean you weren't doing it. This isn't a war, it's a communications breakdown, and the only way to fix those is to ask what information was lost in translation.
And this is the hard part. At this point in an essay, I am supposed to tell you how to fix this, and the truth is I don't know. I've seen it happen time and again over the years, and it tends to be something communities either muddle through, or don't. I've seen it kill spaces, and I've seen it make them better than ever, but more often than any, I think I've seen one of two things:
- The posters push back hard, change nothing, the existing culture is reinforced, and the lurkers leave. The forum doesn't die immediately, but the precedent has been set that it's go along with the culture or take a hike, so membership stagnates.
- Some kind of awkward compromise happens that makes everyone feel bad, posters and lurkers alike drift off with various hard feelings, and the community limps along until it can hopefully cycle enough new blood that the bad vibes get forgotten.
I don't really have a good solution to this. It's something that I've seen happen again and again, but it feels like some fundamental misunderstanding that internet culture just repeats in cycles.
The best I can say is that it seems to be of the most vital importance to learn to recognize the difference between the natural exclusion of any community, and the more hostile and unwelcome varieties, and that means for both posters and lurkers. Sometimes a place just isn't for everyone, but that's difficult to accept for folks who find themselves wanting inclusion but failing through no fault of their own, or through some aspect of themselves that is holding them back.
I can also say that it is important for community leaders to be aware of this cycle, and to take steps to reach out and bring folks into the posting fold where they can. Part of that is setting community mores in the first place that are accepting of folks who don't want to have to muscle their way in to be heard, and part of it is taking active steps to include people. Set aside spaces specifically for new folks to get a toe in the water perhaps.
But all of these answers just ... feel sort of hollow in my mouth. Maybe that's just because sometimes the answer is unpleasant, that not everyone belongs everywhere, much as we'd like it to be, and you can't please everyone. But even saying that feels like a cop out.
It sucks to feel excluded, after all.