I am one of those 'conlangers' that pre-dates the popular use of the Internet by about a decade. Most of us from that era did not know we were 'conlangers', in fact most of us assumed that we were the only people doing what we did as there was little no contact with anyone else in the field!
'Conlanging', the art/hobby of creating fictional languages, has long been a solitary endeavor. JRR Tolkien referred to it as his "secret vice" and was probably reticent to discuss it with people outside of his family and literary circles for fear of being branded a radical. So it was with me through my teenage years. I expressed an interest in languages in general; buying books and reading articles about as many diverse languages one could find in libraries and in encyclopedias.
Then the Internet happened. Email, newsgroups, forums, etc. began to appear as conlangers around the world realized they were not alone and found nerdy comradery in the unlikely corners of cyberspace. Conlangs became more complex as more and more people learned about 'natlangs' (=natural languages; ie languages spoken in the 'real world' as opposed to those created for fiction). Over time the hobby spread to linguistic circles, academics and university students who were also playing with made-up tongues as a way to engineer and test their own research and learning.
You would, therefore, imagine that by the mid 2010s, places like Facebook would offer the perfect playing-field for conlangers to play together: a central, ubiquitous and culturally diverse group of people with a common interest; but you would be wrong.
Facebook groups have made online forums too easy, too passive and too much like watching TV and less like belonging to a society. The main Facebook conlang groups average between 1000 and 4000 members. My experience is that fewer than 300 people are actually active in any regular way and the rest are spectators. The nature of the Internet today is that far more people passively observe the goings-on than actually contribute to the content and as such, we get a lot of armchair critics who are quick to wade in and make (often) scathing negative comments about someone's work.
The Internet has also become the new television: people want to be entertained casually without any effort on their part. They expect the rest of the population to entertain them without giving anything back and this hurts communities such as the Facebook groups.
I was a regular and enthusiastic contributor to the largest constructed language group on Facebook but as its membership grew ever larger, it became populated with 'trolls' who seemed entertained by insulting the more established members of the conlang-community and ripping apart every idea and theory placed before them, often under the premise that they were academically educated linguists (=prescriptivists) who demanded ABC had to be done as CBA or XYZ and there was no accepting anything different.
So, I left the groups I was subscribed to: all of them. I went back to my home office and began to once more create 'conlangs' in the isolation that had once been the only way of working. Admittedly there's still this: blogging and Twitter, but I feel mentally healthier being out of what became a toxic environment not conducive to creative endeavors.
