Community on the internet has been a focus for academic study: "Research into Internet communities and online behaviour constituted one of the earliest and most dynamic fields of interest in the new field of Internet studies ... including understanding how social order was possible in mediated environments, the social and political dimensions of community, the impacts that online communities could have on their offline counterparts."[cit]

Users have been drawn to the YouTube, and other web 2.0 platforms, in the name of community.

According to Howard Rheingold: "Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace."[cit]