You've Ruined Everything

Many times, the roles that are taken up in an online community that's based around a "thing" are so structured and expectant that you could almost fashion carved wooden masks for them. You'd choose to wear that mask and then hop on stage and do the dance that so many have done before you. I don't have direct evidence for this but I suspect it goes many many years back, those conversations lost to history.

There's similar templates for offline communities but that's someone else's job to describe them, and I suspect academic libraries are jammed full of those descriptions. Come to think of it, they're probably jammed with descriptions of online communities too, but here's mine, subject to refinement. Consider it a rough first shot at these definitions, with you getting what you paid for.