I feel like this is sort of the natural consequence of embracing “governance by hardfork”, as Ethereum has. The community has become increasingly fragmented over time, as various groups “vote with their feet” and split into various other forums: Twitter, gitter, ethresear.ch, Ethereum magicians, ethtrader, ethfinance, etc
The problem is that the sum is always less than the whole, and any one of them is more likely to fizzle out than if they had stayed unified. Each carries less momentum, less knowledge, and less diversity than the total, and it starts to show.
You can see this reflected across the whole ecosystem: the many forums, clients, chains, processes, leaders, cliques, everything.
This is what happens when you embrace an approach that encourages and incentivizes fragmentation over cooperation. This leads to natural outcomes like popularity contests, backbiting, trolling, and more; because now there’s always a risk that when the next fragmentation comes, you’ll be on the minority side. To fight this, one (community/forum/individual/group) must always be trying to differentiate and compete to demonstrate fitness… But because this is the internet, the easiest way to do that is to use disinformation.
Governance by hardfork just kinda feels like a race to the bottom.
This is decentralization, I guess?
