Social Platform Ownership & Governance

it's a mistake to think there's some perfect institutional design out there that's going to create the just world that we want. Whatever institutional design you have, humans are humans, and humans are going to strategically manipulate those institutions to try to achieve their ends. And there are going to be inequalities, power disparities, and... See more

When a platform is designed to suppress your reach while amplifying extremists, staying isn’t pragmatic. It’s masochistic.

This all fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power on these platforms. Success on social media is about building community. And you can’t build community if someone else has all the control over how that community works.

The key transformation that needs to occur is from a logic of open source development to a more complex logic of commons-based governance.

Seams can enable governance by delineating space, thereby creat-ing the separation necessary to establish legitimate rules and norms and to perform management, oversight, and enforcement. 39 Territorial bor-ders, the physical architecture of a home, anonymous grading systems, CAPTCHAs, passwords, and other authentication mechanisms serve these... See more