Hi Paula, I’d like to suggest that you are making a common error of missing the nuance in how and…
As for velocity — this is a matter of viscosity. This platform could run very, very fast. But it is not necessary that it do so. It could…
Hi Paula, I’d like to suggest that you are making a common error of missing the nuance in how and why different online communities develop their specific character and dynamics. 4chan is the result of some specific architectural choices (hard anonymity) and path dependent initial cultural seeds (using hard anonymity to say and do nasty things). Reddits slightly different architecture and initial conditions developed a different culture and most fascinatingly, if you look at different subreddits, you will see hundreds of very different sub-cultures — all largely on the same basic infrastructure. [Wikipedia is similar.] It is not a foregone conclusion that any and all virtual platforms must behave like 4chan or wikipedia. The meaningful questions are: what are preferred cultural dynamics (e.g., civil discourse, the Core Protocols, etc.) and what kinds of architectural choices and early norms will tend to upregulate these preferred cultural dynamics and downregulate others?
As for velocity — this is a matter of viscosity. This platform could run very, very fast. But it is not necessary that it do so. It could also run very, very slow. That all depends on the specific design choices.
I am of the opinion that we are at the crux of a series of unspeakably important questions (species survival and all that). We must take care to think, speak and coordinate thoughtfully. The concerns that you raise are *important* concerns and could easily befall a poorly designed system. But they are not fatal. Remember, the Constitutional Convention began and ended in months and they had about 55 people working on it.
As for money. Remember everyone reads everything differently and many people take something like this as “not enough potency to get off the ground” rather than “too much, be more careful”. I put the mention of money in there for those folks — if you are concerned about our ability to move fast, or about how hard it might be to explain something this complex to most people, there are techniques to rapidly accelerate adoption. These techniques can be designed to deliver adoption without delivering oligarchy — although nothing is without substantial risk.