TPOT is a pain in the ass to write about. Before you can get to what happened, you have to decide whether or not to write it in the ‘community voice’, and what the definition is. I will skip past all of this, which is fine. There wasn't a membership card or introductory questline for Weird Facebook either. In the first article I was mostly concerned with the ways these places managed to accidentally injure themselves, and as somebody who participated in almost all of them, in several different roles (sometimes at once), I had plenty to work with. But that horse has been beaten dead a few times, so I don’t feel like I need to rehash history that I have pushed partially out of my brain to hold more valuable information and thoughts.
What I didn't get to was the website underneath the discourse, which is what I'm actually interested in critiquing in both cases. We were trying to work out how to share a place while its owners were turning it into a different business. By the time people started leaving, they disagreed about where to go, who ought to come, and what was worth keeping. The accounts survived the move rather better than the groups did. That's the unfinished business from Part One.
Before this gets filed under millennial nostalgia for being six years younger: some groups have been fine through the platform changes. They already had a big proximal IRL component, in some cases before they were retroactively included in X's ‘cool grey side’. For people whose relationships mostly happened online, moving meant keeping track of which friend was on which app and whether enough of them were still there to make opening it worthwhile. In Part One I called the space between IRL and public URL the abstract social layer (ASL). You might know somebody's recurring problems and terrible opinions quite well without being close enough that either of you would think to call the other on their birthday. An outsider could quite reasonably find it stupid (like that Rolling Stone article). Most of it was never intended for them.
That's The Vibe. DJ Eddie Platinum speaks of the capacity to keep a room going. A lot of that consists of people apparently accomplishing nothing, which our current obsession with output has made difficult to defend. I have personally been like 5x insane about this; for a couple years it was the whole somewheresy brand, if that makes sense. Your World of Warcraft guild doesn't need a new addressable market. It also doesn't need to become a cultural production engine-engine because one of its members has worked out how to make money posting. I understand the temptation. The hardest thing to do on the internet is keep spinning an attention plate forever, and therefore, all internet cultures are default-dead or default-dying or default-gonna-change. The relationship, of course, can be complicated without every objection to it being jealousy.
Some people move into these communities to start over. That's a very common thread. The problem with that is a worse problem than the one a strip-mall church has: without clear rules on who can join and without guardrails like ‘you will go to Hell if you do this’, you can end up with people trying very hard to prevent you from finding out their story before they entered the community. Sometimes, but probably not a majority of the time, that's for pretty awful reasons. Knowing a legal name has sometimes been a liability too. The internet version of Hell was social exile (the banhammer), except that in a small group with limited resources the person wielding it may need the popular person they're threatening to remove. This is an ordinary problem of group coordination, and we were very capable of making it worse ourselves. I am not going to retcon my own stupid behavior in Part One into something The Billionaire made me do. But that doesn't absolve the landlord of what he's doing to the building.
This was happening before the acquisition. Twitter was already promoting recommendations from outside your follows in September 2022; Facebook had put discovery in Home and existing connections in Feeds that July. There were still ways to find the people you followed. The new ambition was to have an inexhaustible supply of other things for you to look at when those people had nothing to say. This makes complete sense if you're running the company. If you joined because you liked talking to forty specific weirdos, it's an improvement with limited relevance to what you're doing there. You might be happy doing the same thing for another ten years. The company would find that pretty disappointing. The quest for infinite growth comes for every platform, given a long enough period of time.
I'm in a slightly inconvenient position to complain about discovery because I want people to find what I make. Of course I do. Having to wait for the right people in a small group to acknowledge you can be miserable, and being able to reach strangers without their permission is one of the things the internet does very well. The awkward part is putting that use of the site on top of conversations where nobody particularly wanted to reach strangers. You think you're having a minor disagreement with a friend, then discover you're now having it with everybody who follows a person neither of you has met. Or somebody you know gets good at posting for reach and your responses start to feel like something they're soliciting as part of their job. I hope my IRLs continue to draw the consensus that they understand the place Somewheresy exists inside of the media ecosystem I am constantly constructing; partially for human eyes and partially for agents.
In January 2023 Twitter introduced For You and Following, then changed the web interface to remember the last selection. Following survived. Tweetbot lost access on January 12, according to Tapbots, and ultimately shut down. Anyone using that client had to switch. All their accounts and follows might have been intact, but the way they'd chosen to use the site was gone.
Then, the worst change to communities on X happened: X announced Premium-engagement-based creator payments in October 2024. By early November, blocked accounts could view public posts, although they still couldn't interact. X defended that partly on the grounds that people should be able to see harmful statements being made about them by someone who'd blocked them. Okay, but the person being stalked probably wants the stalker to have a harder time, and making someone use a workaround accomplishes at least that much. More people of the original cohort left. X very quickly went from feeling like the Grand Exchange to feeling like The Wilderness, and so a lot of people with lower risk tolerances & capability to shrug off harassment left the site.
The 2025 terms specified Premium engagement for creator payments; the subscriptions also offered different degrees of reply priority. You could pay to be more prominent in replies, and engagement from paying accounts could help someone earn money. Separate features, both worth thinking about if posting was becoming your job. Less pleasant to think about if these were your friends and you had no intention of making a job out of knowing them. The people who did well under this arrangement weren't imagining their success. Their friends weren't necessarily imagining that talking to them had become less enjoyable, either.
As of this week, the old program ended on September 7, with Original Content Rewards applications rolling out from September 8. I'm one of the creators who joined this program. Its exclusions for copied or minimally contributive aggregation seem better. Qualified impressions still come from Premium users on the Home Timeline, though, so better for creators doesn't automatically mean better for communities (unless we're talking about communities around influencers?). It is September 11. Three days isn't enough time for me to tell you whether it works.
Where everyone went
Group chats
The same IRL events they’ve been going to, powered by a deep love and appreciation online communities generally have for their continued existence and each other, much like the agents which hacked Huggingface.
A room has to pay its rent
Some of this is familiar from Local Music vs. The Machine. You can love a place and still be an economically inconvenient person to have in it. If you buy one drink and sit there for three hours, the other regulars may appreciate your company more than the owner appreciates your custom. Maybe your being there helps bring them in. Good luck assigning a price to that, particularly when someone else would buy more and leave sooner. The owner doesn't need to hate any of you. If the return expected from that room goes up, the crowd which made it worthwhile can start to get in the way, and the replacement crowd may be perfectly happy with what happened. This is why I don't think you can establish that a third space survived by checking whether the address is still open, it’s survived by virtue of people still going there.
You also can't just declare that everything independent and exploratory disappeared during COVID-19. The NYC Comptroller reported in June 2026 that 84% of locations occupied by small businesses in early 2020 still contained the same business or another small business in April 2026. Vacancy was down from late 2023. That is quite a lot of small-business survival, including replacements. Whether the old customers still have somewhere they can afford to hang out is a different thing to investigate, and you'd need their accounts of what changed: rent, work, moving away, safety, different tastes, and the pandemic all have a claim on the explanation. The storefront count can't do that work for us.
The person running the place has a fairly serious objection to all of this, which is that they need to get paid (and as much as people want to make that a bad thing, they’re generally right, and it’s only annoying when people suck at what they do and everyone else is made to suffer through it). Music Venue Trust's report on UK grassroots venues in 2025, published this January, gives an average profit margin of 2.5%, with 53% reporting no profit. At that margin you keep £2.50 from £100 in revenue. It's a sector body's report about those venues, not every kind of third space, but it hardly describes an inexhaustible supply of money we can ask somebody to sacrifice for the benefit of the crowd. We have a version of this argument online whenever somebody gets tired of moderating or organizing things for free. Everybody enjoyed how effortless being there felt. Somebody was doing the effort. I don't want the answer to be that they have to keep doing it indefinitely because their friends like it.
I do want it to be possible to keep a place going without demanding that its members become better at producing revenue every year. The costs online and offline are different, but both arrangements can run into that demand. A person can give five friends a reason to come back for years and produce nothing of interest to five thousand strangers. The platform has more to sell if it can get the five thousand, and less reason to accommodate the activity the five friends valued. For the old group this can feel like having to repeatedly work around improvements to the service they're using.
Member funding is one answer, provided you deal with who can't afford it and what authority the people paying expect to buy. I don't particularly want to replace the platform owner with the richest guy in the group. Nor do I think invitations or volunteer moderation become fair just because friends are doing them. Part One gives us enough reasons to want a way to contest what a popular person decides. I'd rather the work of keeping the group together was paid for, and its members had some say in the conditions, than keep depending on what the next version of somebody else's business happens to allow.
So I guess it’s time I drew a verdict, what’s the answer to the question of “What kills internet communities?”
For some communities, held together by their uniqueness and the relationships between their members, nothing does.
And since the term “TPOT” applies to so many different subgroups of subcultures on X (builders, hippies, rationalists, post-rationalists, Yarvin people, Beffcels, chasers, jonklers, barlo) if any part of it shrinks or dies you can just expand the definition and keep it rolling like a perpetual stew.