All about social networks

The mistake of the 1.0 platforms was to optimize for engagement—likes, clicks, and shares. This was a successful short-term growth strategy, but at the long-term cost of sustainability. For engagement includes not only joy but rage, not only mirth but sadness. Incentivizing these things creates hellishness, driving people to disengage, to become... See more

The goal shouldn’t be to recreate offline governance, online, after a period of trial-and-error. Internet-native organizations can’t and shouldn’t operate like geographic governments because they don’t face the same constraints. Once online governance models evolve past a certain point, they should be both different from and superior to offline... See more

Speaking towards this goal, the next lesson I’ve come to learn is that imagining the New Internet is not the same as building it. In my time around the archipelago of internet reform there have been no shortage of ambitious ideas. In the process of implementing said ideas, it was revealed time and time again that ambitiousness does not equal... See more

A crucial element to lowering the stakes of any particular moderation decision is the knowledge that the user has the genuine option to go to another community or start his own. The same applies to moderators: The ultimate check on a moderator’s power is that if most users start to believe he is using it poorly, users can either protest until a new... See more