Hello JoeS1,
welcome to this forum! Your quoted post contains a lot of interesting opinion on the topics books, teaching and go community. Since, on L19, derailing is depreciated and some subforums exist for specific topics, I have had to split my reply in three threads. Regardless, your opinion deserves replies on every topic. Here is my reply on the topic of go communities.
JoeS1 wrote: I haven't had the best experiences with the community.
The go communuity differs from country to country and continent to continent. Here, in Germany / Europe, I cannot share your experience: mostly the community is like a huge family. Online discussion also differs from service to service, forum to forum and server to server; my experience has been extremely mixed. Another differentiating factor is unmoderated (active users are happy, spam occurs) versus moderated (some active users are restricted for the alleged benefit of a greater number of less active users, spam is deleted).
"The (one) community" is an euphemism. While at times the world of go can be perceived as one family, at other times you wonder where the heck some communities disappeared.
Quote: The community isn't always very friendly or open about discussing Go.
This differs very greatly depending on in which community, forum, server etc. you are, and when. E.g., KGS discussion moved from "free, lively, and sometimes ironic" to "if you dare to be off-topic, you might be excluded" because nowadays moderators enjoy their power too much. Similar, but different in nature, things can be said about some other communities.
When moderation kills motivation of some previously active users and closes part of prior openness, the task of quality or friendly discussion falls to the second- and third-most active users. However, there is a very great gap in potential activity between most-active and less-active users. This has been so in every community I have seen - real world or online communities.
Super strong players or most-active discussants do not grow like grass. Either kind greatly profits from being exceptionally well-informed about go matters. If a community does not cultivate them, they lack motivation or move to different communities or (go) activities.
Then a community develops as a "mid kyu have the saying" group, and you find yourself right in cricising such a state of affairs as greatly suboptimal for learning or at least long-term rich discussion.
Another factor: the more interesting (for the experienced users) your questions are the more likely you get profound answers and lively discussions - until a moderator thinks it would be too lively and confuses serious, detailed discussion with flooding.
Quote: There are typically several hundred people on KGS yet there is almost never any discussion about Go or high level Go.
KGS is a go playing server rather than a discussion forum. Discussion occurs mostly in top games. However, recent years' moderation has restricted very much of that. If commenting is no fun because one may not make a joke or have an off-topic interlude (usually rather high level because so many bright people would want to discuss), then some strong players quit and discussion quickly drops to 1/3 of what it could have been.
Everybody perfectly understands that children must be protected from undue, careless adult talk but moderators on KGS have overdone their job greatly. It is hard to be a moderator: watch a lively discussion for hours without saying anything can easily be beyond a moderator's patience and tolerance. Uhm, who recalls the lively IGS comments about dove soup in the stone age of the internet?
Quote: No Dan level players discussing how to help people around the kyu level.
On KGS? I guess this is a tough place for such help. People are expected to use discussion forums for help and servers for playing.
Quote: It's tough to say, but I don't think the Go community has grown much in the West over the past several years.
Right. We grow too slowly, or not at all.
Quote: especially when you have people around 5kyu to 8kyu typically doing the reviews.
You can complain about the dans or reconsider their honorary overall contibution to go communities of, in some cases, dozens of thousands of hours. (As, e.g., in my case. I quit university because of too much study and discussion of go.)
Quote: The more dans in the community the more competition there will be.
Yes. So far the theory.
Quote: The more high level discussion there will be as well.
We had a lot of high level discussion on rec.games.go, an unmoderated newsgroup.
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Also, playing over pro games, especially if you spend some time working out how you would play before looking at the pro's move, would give you important feedback.