Hey Mike, good question there, something I’ve been thinking about as well. It actually might be not feasible or even desirable for people to vote on certain issues — say, it probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense to have a popular vote on what server to host the platform on every 6 months, for example. So there’s always going to be a give and take between representative and direct democracies, as is the case in real life.

This was more or less intended as a “first step” towards getting people used to having to actually deal with situations of distributed power, which the Internet has been pretty dismal about up until this point. On the net, you’re basically incentivized to do whatever you want, but get punished when you cross the line of whatever the platform’s terms of service happens to be at the time. You basically have no accountability towards others, except in your relationship to your host.

I think that this way of operating doesn’t really teach the right lessons to people about how communities, justice, debates, and elections really work. I figure that if people get used to having to debate/discuss things towards things that actually affect them in their virtual worlds, they’d feel less alienated and maybe even take an interest in real world politics as well.

Honestly, I don’t really know how receptive the tech industry will be to this idea, since it runs counter to a lot of the business models that they’ve built up until this point. But I figure that there ought to be some companies out there who wouldn’t mind having a more civil environment to host their content, at the very least.