thinking about decentraland, thanks to Dan Olson
thinking about how federation and “decentralization” (as shown in many a failed crypto project) are essentially two sides of dealing with lack of trust in online interactions
either you try to crush out the social messiness by setting up hard mechanically-enforced rules that intend to treat everyone equally, or you embrace the social messiness and negotiate with people as people
of course, the reason that crypto projects always go down in flames is that you can’t just remove the social messiness. you can blind yourself to it and convince yourself that you fixed it, but that doesn’t fix the actual problems between people
thinking about decentraland, thanks to Dan Olson
I can only speak for myself, but I didn’t have to spend long moderating before I determined that trying to use only hard and exact rules was a fool’s errand.
it rewards those assholes who play right up to the line, the exact kind of people you don’t want in a community. good moderation requires being able to have discretion, being able to kick someone out who just has dreadful creepy vibes *before* they do something unspeakable
therefore “we’ll treat everyone equally by enshrining the rules as fixed with no discretion whatsoever” is the worst possible solution to community management
thinking about decentraland, thanks to Dan Olson
turns out the solution to negotiating trust is to… negotiate trust, with all the messy grey areas that entails. who’d have thought?
and besides, putting financial incentives into social situations has literally never de-escalated a problem. rewarding people by letting them steal money for finding loopholes in your rules is so comically silly that I’d almost think it was written as satire
thinking about decentraland, thanks to Dan Olson
@gardevoir The way a friend communicated this to me awhile back, in unrelated context during the forum era, was "you can't use a technical solution to solve a social problem." I think about that a lot these days.
thinking about decentraland, thanks to Dan Olson
@gardevoir (Which is to say: you can try, and said technical solution might gain traction for awhile. But the thing is, human beings are incredibly creative, diverse, and versatile, and will find ways to maximize or route around any engineering solution. Such that you will always need to meet a social problem with social solutions, empathy, and support or moderation.)
