I was a huge proponent of this in the early days of the web and was leading the crusade for reader engagement, championing the idea of anonymous commentary and a pure marketplace of ideas.
Well, it turns out I had an over-optimistic view of people.
Maybe so, but I still think this can work. I think the problem is that we've moved away from communities focused around a particular topic to just throwing everyone into a pool and crossing our fingers.
If a community has a topic and the majority of users are interested in discussing that topic, then when someone veers off-topic to rant about their favorite conspiracy theory, you don't have to be a judge of the validity of his viewpoint. You just gently point out that's not what people are there to talk about and that they're welcome to discuss said conspiracy theory over on yonder conspiracy theory aficionado forum (and ban them if they continue trying to detract from the conversation).
This then removes moderators as judges of what is Right and True (the problem facing moderators on Facebook/YouTube/other anything-goes platforms) and positions them in the much more manageable role of, well, moderating a conversation.
The problem isn't an ideological or semantic one but the fact that most news operations don't have the resources or motivation to moderate online commentary effectively, and the cost of poisoning conversation is trivially low.
Most new organizations are also general-purpose, meaning the organization will cover everything from politics to sports to tech to finance to gossip. My assertion is that trying to be all things to all people leads us into impossible-to-moderate scenarios even before you look at the motivation/resources available with which to perform said moderation.
I'm proposing approaching the US code and other bodies of law (and associated jurisprudence) as a Wiki and seeing what happens. I propose that this could be an improvement over the whole representative democracy approach.
What no one really wants to admit here on YC is that the userbase here is something like the top .01% of (intelligence / literacy / analytical skills). Hell, even reddit, as low-brow as that has gotten, is still top 1% easily. But there are still plenty of staggeringly oblivious views in both places.
It's hard to admit that dichotomy, because when we realize that the top 1% or .01% can still be so ignorant, we also gradually realize that we are all probably in for a lot of trouble moving forward, particularly if and when resource wars become a bit more widespread than they are now.
> userbase here is something like the top .01% of (intelligence / literacy / analytical skills).
If this were true, I would have lost whatever little faith in humanity I had left. But I very much doubt it, being good at some "hackery" thing is completely orthogonal to being intelligent/smart in any normal meaning of the word.
Well, whichever measure of IQ you want to use as a proxy for intelligence, it's plausible that the self-selected group of people who comment on HN is higher compared to the world population (oh, this includes me, too -- how embarassing). How much higher is an empirical question which is unlikely to be settled, although I would guess that your .01% is a bit of an overestimate.
The important point, though, is that "dichotomy" not the same as "contradiction". The contradiction between your estimate of the high intelligence of HN commenters and the, let's say, less-than-intelligent ideas sometimes expressed here can be explained by noticing that being somewhat smart doesn't make someone immune to having stupid ideas.
What, after all, is the minimal IQ beyond which one will never make a mistake?
> What, after all, is the minimal IQ beyond which one will never make a mistake?
I'd argue 0, in that a being completely incapable of even attempting thought would be unable to have an incorrect thought. But that's a bit of a reductio ad absurdum
The major consequence of this for me is that it has caused me to reevaluate my views on representative democracy.
Edit: As a clarification, while I still tend toward a preference for representative democracy, I now acknowledge that it is possible for a fruitful and productive society to flourish in systems that some may label as an "oppressive dictatorship".
Major consequence of what? If we accept for a moment the extremely questionable proposition that HN and Reddit posters are some sort of intellectual elite, yet "there are still plenty of staggeringly oblivious views in both places", all that means is that you wouldn't be able to find an enlightened dictator, would you?
And indeed what we see is that oppressive dictatorships never have high quality people running them. They're always overrun with corruption, absurd ideas, forged statistics, pseudo-intellectual waffle (see: the books and political thinking created by the leaders of the USSR) and to the extent they may seem more intelligent or erudite than the working classes it's only because they craft their image so carefully.
You say you now acknowledge it's possible for a "fruitful and productive society to flourish" in an oppressive dictatorship, but what on earth are you thinking of here? Surely not China, which has thrown millions of its own citizens into concentration camps, trashed its environment, routinely seems to report false GDP numbers, relies on capital controls to keep the rich Chinese from leaving, is famous throughout the world for IP theft, has practically disconnected itself from the global internet and has radically misallocated resources in many well documented ways? That fruitful and productive society?
I abandoned that idea a while ago. I think we could move toward a wikiocracy, which would have problems of its own but for which we have a working prototype that is reasonably transparent, responsive, and accessible and delivered a significant public good in a relatively short time frame.
How would the rules look for establishing the long-term governance of a wikiocracy? Specifically, my impression is that it works because it has good people. If the good people left and lesser people replaced them, could it still be made to work?
One of the things I'll give the US is as crappy as the leaders get, the system still remains cohesive rather than suffering a bloody coup every four years.
Well lots of other countries get on OK with parliamentary democracies, I don't think the US system is uniquely reliable in this regard. You'd have to look at the ups and downs of Wiki edit wars, figure out what standards would apply for citations of empirical data as valid policymaking inputs and so forth. I don't think Wikipedia has especially 'good people', just experienced ones and a general agreement to operate within the wiki framework.
>I don't think the US system is uniquely reliable in this regard
Completely agree. I'm just speaking from an American perspective. There are plenty of other countries that are similarly stable (perhaps even moreso thanks to having more than two diametrically opposed parties).
The "general agreement to operate within the framework" bit was what I was getting at with "good people". I'm not sure how stable it would be against a concerted effort to disrupt/distort it. But I haven't looked into its governance in much depth, either, thus my original question.
Politicians have been talking up what they call evidence-based policymaking for years. That'd be the equivalent of citing empirical data for policymaking inputs. Unfortunately it's not that easy, as the endless edit wars and fights over what constitutes a reliable citation shows.
> One of the things I'll give the US is as crappy as the leaders get, the system still remains cohesive rather than suffering a bloody coup every four years.
Pretty much every system in the world has that feature. Heck, that's a standard of quality so low North Korea’s government passes with honors.
Well, it turns out I had an over-optimistic view of people.