Gatekeeping Is Essential for the Survival of Communities

There must be some sort of selectivity when it comes to gatekeeping people from a certain community; completely blocking every single person isn't a good idea, and completely allowing in every single person is still not a good idea either. Both are improper and effectively destroy communities, so there's got to be a wise balance between the two.

You don't want to give every community AIDS, do you!?

There have been many different things that used to have a higher barrier of entry (or literal "application forms"), then somebody stepped in, in the attempt to make it all more "beginner-friendly" and "accessible," only to effectively destroy everything in the process. One such example is the internet itself; to even get on the internet, technical skills (for things like BBS, IRC, and FTP servers) were a must, but with the introduction of the iPhone and similar overpriced rectangles to the masses, technology deliberately became idiot-proof and eventually shifted from something people understand to something they consume without any idea how anything works under the hood, and now it's habitated by a horde of mindless cattle getting offended by literally anything, reducing all programs to a bundle of "apps" and believing that Google is the internet or that AI has feelings, thus allowing corporations to inject spyware and create a dependency-based ecosystem in order to control billions of lives in every possible aspect, including even those not dependent on their services. The end result? They're all as unhappy as all the rest of us are! The veterans and knowledgeable netizens have been pushed in the corner so much that it's a matter of time before the boundaries break, all of us just falling outside of it.

Another example is GNU/Linux. Before the conception of Ubuntu, you had to have technical knowledge in order to use it (funny when you realize that Linus Torvalds himself couldn't figure out how to install Debian back then, and he's now using Fedora with GNOME). Then, Ubuntu came along which made it easy for the newcomers to get in, and now we have GNOME, GTK4, Flatpaks, Snaps, Avahi, PulseAudio, D-Bus, Systemd (see: Systemd Sucks), (e)logind, wlroots, and other freedesktop.org plights which have destroyed the environment for both beginner and advanced users, and now Red Hat is copulating with Linux, effectively turning it into a de facto proprietary project while Linus is seemingly approving the cuckoldry, and no "advanced" distro (like Arch/Artix, Debian/Devuan, Gentoo, Alpine, Void, and Slackware) is saved of the consequences.

Programming is the same way; we had Better Software when programming was still "hard" and low-level, but now with "coders" included into the programmer space we have things like Python, Rust, OOP, gigantic libraries and frameworks, and other trash that shouldn't exist anyway. Now look at what the entirety of software has become; look at what the web has become, look at what gaming has become, look at what the desktop has become. It's all your fault, and it's all going to get much worse with the introduction of shitbots and LLMs!

Abstraction and accessibility aren't bad practices in of themselves, but there's a point where things become so dumbed down that they're both dumber and more down than a retard. Surely, "beginner-friendliness" does have a useful role as an introduction to something "normies" would otherwise refuse to even peek from a safe distance, but it should then graduately stimulate them into going deeper, and you help them to get good and learn about the community that they may conform and adapt to its culture. They don't do that because you don't expect them to; instead, you incentivise them to stay with their mental retardation and you keep playing along with it (while the original members of a community suffer the consequences of "LARPing" or whatever). Imagine teaching your little kid how to ride a bicycle but never remove the little side wheels, and instead add a bunch of pillows around that bicycle so you can then brag how your 60 year old child never fell off his bicycle.

What we should do is focus on the growth of the competent minority who actually care to understand how things work inside of a certain community. Anything that becomes too "popular" amongst a society largely compromised of idiots inevitably invites infiltration, dilution, and mass exploitation by other idiots of the same caliber. Therefore, please think twice about sharing smaller communities, especially groups you don't take part in much yourself, as some may not benefit much from waves of newcomers (and I don't mean simply "newcomers," but lots of newcomers at once). It's easy to drown out existing culture and customs without noticing if a large enough group comes along suddenly.