Is the internet just special that way…
People really do, quite literally, gather around words. The internet is a space of discourse — so every netizen wields language at their own level, and encounters language through language.
I've really been feeling that lately.
For example, that SNS/community for correspondence-school graduates I scrapped — if I'd actually gone through with it, what would have happened? I'm pretty sure the stereotypical correspondence-school-graduate type (= the kind of people media and news problematize: troublemakers, shut-ins spending their days in a stupor, withdrawn dropouts — in short, generally negative figures) would have flocked to it.
The interesting people I'd hoped to attract — hackers, entrepreneurs, artists, aspiring manga artists — they wouldn't show up the way I imagined.
If you gather people by MBTI, you'll attract the type of person whose day is one-third constituted by MBTI (despite MBTI being just one tool among many for self-analysis).
If you promote a cat-themed joke site, far more people who are intensely into cats than you can imagine will show up.
So… a double-edged sword. Difficult to handle. And in most cases, it's broken from the start, or the exit strategy was never really there.