| To push the metaphor a bit too far, I think it's more about people realizing they just don't want cake that much. As you say, it's perfectly possible to build a good community if you're willing to put some work into it. People who run community-oriented sites mostly know this by now. But a lot of sites pick up communities accidentally. Blogs tend to have comments enabled by default. Adding a forum to a site sometimes seems like a simple idea that will make users happy. Social networking features seem like a must have for some kinds of web apps, even if they aren't the main focus. And of course, these accidental communities inevitably decay until the reek of them spreads through the whole site. I think a lot of people are remembering that they didn't actually want to run communities in the first place. They added community features because it was the path of least resistance, and now that they've seen where it leads, they're turning them off rather than sinking a lot of effort into making them work. I'm pretty happy with the development, personally. The communities I like are going to stick around, and as for the others, well, there are more than enough places to have flamewars already. (Disclaimer: I turned off comments on my own blog a couple of months ago. It's made me a happier person, but I may be projecting just a bit.) |