Participatory democracry perhaps? What if sites like these became the democracry? What if your vote on sites like these actually decided policy rather than simply informing your representatives about how you think? Then the government itself becomes an unnecessary middle man and the algorithm becomes the government.
"It may not sound like a revolution if government officials simply listen more to members of the public, but it’s not really that revolutionary if the opinions are then ignored by the bureaucrats. Ms. Noveck is clear that none of her efforts is meant to create a sort of direct democracy.
There is a reason you want people with expertise working in the jobs we have, she said. But she said that the new online tools will nonetheless put pressure on officials to take public opinion into account."
I don't see why we should stop short of direct democracy? If the technology allows it, why not?
A voting system is extremely effective in preventing trolling here but only because PG put time into instilling the principles he wanted in the community through constant repetition, like training a dog. That required a lot of time on his part initially. Now imagine multiplying that by, say, 30 small sites that you are administering. So, I think it's not that the problem has been solved. PG may need to step in from time to time if the community 'forgets' the principles he started it with - such as when there is a big influx of new users.
Lower participation and, as a result, maybe lower advertising earnings. On the other hand, the cost of not controlling bad content could be much higher both in monetary and non-monetary terms.
Anonymity creates a low barrier to entry, facilitating free participation. But at the expense of requiring manual moderation. I don't know how much time has been spent on troll moderation on HN. But let's say you have 100 small sites - moderation could be quite time consuming. And if the sites are too small to allow you to identify trusted users to offload the moderation to (perhaps through some application features), it is doubly problematic. However, identity verification is an easy solution, although at the expense of reducing participation by creating a higher barrier to entry.
Do you accept the argument that this will not affect the majority of applications on App Engine? I had the impression that large numbers of apps were already exceeding the existing quotas.
"That's what won't happen to most of us. Rather than filling out the form for food assistance, we will be filling out recruiters info sheets describing "a time I worked as part of a team" and rating our C++ skills on a scale of 1-10."
"It may not sound like a revolution if government officials simply listen more to members of the public, but it’s not really that revolutionary if the opinions are then ignored by the bureaucrats. Ms. Noveck is clear that none of her efforts is meant to create a sort of direct democracy.
There is a reason you want people with expertise working in the jobs we have, she said. But she said that the new online tools will nonetheless put pressure on officials to take public opinion into account."
I don't see why we should stop short of direct democracy? If the technology allows it, why not?