Wisely 's Library tagged spectators →  View Popular

Though both are held together in some way by communication, an
audience is typified by a one-way relationship between sender and
receiver, and by the disconnection of its members from one another --
a one-to-many pattern. In a community, by contrast, people typically
send and receive messages, and the members of a community are
connected to one another, not just to some central outlet -- a
many-to-many pattern

communities have strong upper limits
on size, while audiences can grow arbitrarily large. Put another way,
the larger a group held together by communication grows, the more it
must become like an audience -- largely disconnected and held together
by communication traveling from center to edge -- because increasing
the number of people in a group weakens communal connection.