I think the life cycle of collaborative projects - small circle to big blowup, drifting from the original spirit or ethos for better or worse - will be accelerated by algorithmically-driven social media. Hell, it's already happening.

When I look at older collaborative fiction, it's much more likely to remain centered around a few core creators and their guidelines or approaches. The more content in a project is owned by them, the more they're able to influence others to not diverge too far from it.

When things blow up massively, that can all change in a heartbeat. Whoever is running the project frequently struggle to maintain those guidelines: Either because they don't want to seem like controlling jerks, or because the flood of new content genuinely overwhelms their ability to moderate.

The problem is, this accelerated lifecycle can also burn out projects far more rapidly as people become disconnected from what appealed to them in the first place.