The Vape Community After Regulation: What Survives—and What's Been Lost

The vape shop on the corner is closed. The cloud competitions are gone. The open-source innovation ecosystem—tinkerers sharing designs, manufacturers iterating rapidly—has been replaced by corporate product development. **The vaping community has been transformed by regulation: the visible, commercial, physical elements have largely disappeared. What survives is the invisible: online communities, advocacy networks, the informal knowledge-sharing that the internet enables. The community is smaller, more diffuse, and harder to regulate.**