Even if the Summit is 'by capsuleers, for capsuleers,' there is frequently about 70-100 people hanging around in channel.
1) Why would a shy character go to a place with 100 strangers sitting around and talk about private matters?
2) All it takes is for 1 person to record the channel and release it on GalNet to get million or billions of people watching. There's no way this is not happening.
1) Well, there's the sort of pseudo-privacy one can have by chatting in a small, quiet public environment with a few dozen lurkers, and then there's what we're talking about, here. I mean, I can see what you're trying to get at, but in my opinion the sheer difference in scale streches the comparison.
For example, I'm reasonably shy in real life (if not nearly as much as my character), yet I'm still posting here, a decently busy forum. However, if I knew my post was going to be seen by
millions of people, I'd probably be too nervous to say a single word.
2) You have a fair point there, but honestly, I've of the opinion that a single Capsuleer probably couldn't command those sort of numbers and interest, realistically. It strikes me a bit as the roleplay community taking an idea established in the PF - In this case, that Capsuleers can easily become celebrities by virtue of their immense wealth and ability to perform larger then life feats - And taking it to an extreme the creators didn't intend it to be taken. (In the same sense as the "1 Isk = Enough to buy a mansion" idea people sometimes go with.)
I mean, Capsuleers are pretty rare and stuff, but there's still a
ton around by now. Let's try to get some numbers here just for the sake of arguement. There's about 500,000 just from the present amount of active accounts, to start with, and one could
generously times that by about ten or so for all the pilots who's accounts are inactive but still exist within the universe, which would bring us to about 5,000,000 ish. PF establishes that the independent Capsuleers that we play are actually in the minority, and that there's a bunch more directly in service to the Empires - We'll be generous again and only double the figure, taking it up to about 10,000,000.
If our market here is public interest, that's pretty darn saturated.
I don't dispute that if one were to go out of their way to get themselves in the public eye using their influence by making big charitable donations or opening space shopping malls or what-have-you, they could eventually become decently famous. But I'm pretty skeptical about a Capsuleer gaining massive amounts of fans and popularity just by the virtue of existing, when there's so many about that it's probably not that much of a novelty anymore. The default state is probably obscurity.
Why would baseliners care so much about a single comms channel with a relatively pretty small amount of participants, when there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other public or corporate channels with a much greater participation? What's a hundred shmucks in the face of such a massive pool of individuals?
The IGS perhaps warrants such attention canonically because it is
the official CONCORD Capsuleer forum, (which is why Gwen talks completely differently there then anywhere else) but the Summit is no such thing, despite the name.
Then again, I can respect other peoples interpretations. I'm just a fan of keeping things understated.
Edit: Thinking on it, I'm not sure I agree with the statement of "There's no way that isn't happening", either. If the channel
was intended to be private, it'd be pretty easy to track whoever was leaking it to the public and force them to face concequences for it. Just handwaving it seems a bit odd.