I can trace an arc, over the past ten years, of my attitude towards communities:
“Yay communities! Let’s all share event invites and do everything together and everything will be great!”
“Hm, I’m organizing events for people but I’m not really enjoying them, and it doesn’t really make me feel fulfilled”
“Inviting people to events doesn’t seem to cause them to reciprocate by sending me invites back”
“I think the people in my community actually are having a lot of events, they’re just not inviting me to most of them”
“I seem to have more fun interacting with people who aren’t in my community. What’s up with that?”
“Communities are okay but friends are better.”
I never found a solution for how to get people to invite me to things. I think the problem is that I personally am really picky about the sorts of events I enjoy (ie, I don’t like drinking or sports), so if I want to have an event that I will enjoy I have to make it myself.
But I did find a solution for how to have good events: make sure that all the people that I invite to my event are people who specifically want to do that event. Don’t invite people because “they’re part of the community” or “I want to make sure they’re not lonely”; the risk is that they might show up because it’s their only social outlet, and then they might not participate in the way that I wanted.
Nowadays I think of communities as places to meet people who could be my friends.
The post is saying: “Here’s a very common thing that basically everybody does sometimes.”
And then it’s telling us that, if you identify that someone is doing this thing, this should be sufficient evidence to cast them out of society. Even if they have good intent, even if there’s no evidence of harm, even if nobody has told them the thing they are doing is bad.
I’m worried that this is basically a general-purpose tool for anyone to denounce anyone else.
I think the author should get a lot of credit for identifying that this is dangerous and admitting how dangerous it is right in the post. But I wish that she’d gone a step further and refined the post until it wasn’t dangerous in this way.