Don't believe all those accidental selectors. Talk to people who have been there a year or more. Find out which people are deeply involved in the community's central movements. This is likely to be a better indicator of your chances of happiness than the superficial things that strike the eye the first day. So the moral of all this is two-fold.
Communities are complex organisms, and simple messages are almost always wrong.
This article is reprinted with permission from Dandelion's newsletter, Pappus.