Fake community is fake–wherever you find it. One thing I hope I’ve gotten across in writing about Web communities here is that great communities are pretty much accidental–one interesting person happens to know another interesting person, they happen to start sharing thoughts at the same place, and all of a sudden you have a site that people want to visit. The flip side of that coin is that fake community is almost always planned–Yahoo! Answers tried to be a more popular Ask Metafilter, and ended up being filled with drivel, because it is intended to make money, and no people with an actual investment in the content get involved. New York street fairs are the Yahoo! Answers of the real world.

I hate street fairs. New Yorkers will know what I’m talking about–a summer Saturday afternoon ruined by the same people that move to other streets on other Saturdays, filling up a few of your neighborhood blocks with “Tres Bon French Crepes,” cheap posters, sausages, funnel cakes, tube socks, and some sort of corn/mozzarella concoction. But the fact that I don’t like the products, the traffic problems, or the garbage isn’t really the point. The point is that they’re all the same, whether on the Upper East or here in the West Village–they’re not about the neighborhood at all. “Street fair” means to me an event where you are showcasing businesses, people, and causes on that street. Instead, it’s a bunch of people from somewhere else selling stuff to your street. I’m not entirely sure that I’m justified, but it feels to me like cheating. They don’t live here or work here, so why do they get to clog up my street?

Would local businesses make the same effort? Would people be more interested in a real, local party? I’m not sure, but I sure would, and I think that people like it when the businesses they deal with have made an investment in the community as well.