Yep, your concerns are very valid and I can’t really guarantee that the ideas I suggested will work 100% either. That’s kind of why I thought it’d be good for companies to try to experiment with some of the more inconsequential things (like background color, font type) first to see if it’s feasible on a technical level.
After proving that people can handle the easy stuff, maybe you can start thinking about having “elections” for picking new admins in cases where the former ones either go missing or inactive. Roll in these features incrementally as you would with any other feature addition. I was thinking that localized entities such as Facebook or Meetup groups might be good candidates for this idea since they’re kind of where these kinds of features might find itself the most useful.
For private companies, it’s going to always be a give and take between the people’s will and the company’s policies, and controlling their content is completely within their right to do so. But the value proposition for them here is that if you give your customers some autonomy and direct say in how things are done, you’re more likely to have greater engagement and loyalty in the long run. Oh, and elections should probably be an “opt-in” feature as well, at least for private entities. If people are happy with their admins, no reason why people need to switch over.
For public and government platforms? Well, that’s another can of worms, but they might be able to poach a few ideas from here to build government sites that facilitate community discussion and engagement while keeping the trolls at bay. There’s plenty of kooks in real-life politics, too, but the limited time you have at the podium is what keeps them from dominating the discussion as it tends to happen most of the time online.
Either way it’s a wide open space and there’s a lot of work/experimentation to be done before we can say it’s possible or impossible either way. I think if we keep our objectives realistic and attainable, it could potentially build into something bigger over time. Just not all at once.
