The average small friend-group discord server starts simple, starts close-knit. And time passes, friends of friends join, eventually forming a distinction between the 'old' and the 'new'. More time passes, and the climate slowly changes; no longer quite so close-knit. Then inevitably, one of the first original members leaves. And this is in most cases the beginning of the end, a change that can only be delayed, not reversed.

As more members leave, the server drifts farther away from the vision it was set out to be, and more and more of the core members go inactive or leave entirely. Once this reaches critical mass, the server either burns out or overturns its members, its focus, its goal.

This is a pattern I've seen countless times in online communities. Much like any other social space, they are in a continual, inevitable state of change, in cycles where they are born, mature, grow old, and eventually die.

But though the same sort of patterns happen across nearly all social circles, every cycle's start is unique, its middle-age plays out unlike any before, and ends in its own way, too. So perhaps such a pattern isn't about the rigidity of social norm, but a meta-pattern in human behavior itself, and the way we respond and adapt to changes in ourselves, those around us, in the way we all interconnect; Seeing that larger, more physically-based communities still experience these same effects but over a longer timescale, what does this imply about the world we live in today?

tags: life