Are we under attack?

I think this is just the privacy community, and PG as a part of that, actually gaining momentum and attracting more people.

When a community is a small group of early adopters there is space and time available for nuance. Everyone is well versed in the technical aspects and the history of how we got where we are.

Then the community grows. This causes two problems. The first is that more people who haven’t spent the time to become deeply knowledgeable about the topic start to become the majority…and they therefore start to get loud.

This leads to the second problem, social dynamics of large groups. This includes both tribalism as people break into factions and then competition for attention…which leads to decibel level often beating out quality. This is where you get the people wanting to sound hip by calling everyone else a sellout.

Again this is a human dynamic and not specific to the privacy community. But the privacy community growing means it attracts larger numbers of people and well…quality of commentary drops fast.