The dangers of creating creating accusatory atmospheres in growing communities | What can we do about this?
What is a blockchain? A blockchain is nothing more than a data structure to service a community of people
Behind every blockchain is a community which gives meaning, value, and wealth. A blockchain is worthless data without a community of human beings giving meaning to that data. A blockchain is called a data structure because it is a way of structuring data similar to the function of a database. So first I want to say that this discussion rests on the fact that a blockchain is just a data structure to service a community of people.
What is an accusatory atmosphere?
Some of us within the Steemit community and of course distributed in many other communities can recognize that as technology becomes more sophisticated and is connecting us together there is also many negative aspects as well. One of the most negative aspects is the ease of creating accusatory atmospheres and the technological debt crisis in software intersecting. To illustrate the concept of an accusatory atmosphere it would make sense to take a look at the Salem Witch trials example 1 the McCarthyism example 2 and some would like to include the university campus example 3. The creation of an accusatory atmosphere may be deliberate or accidental but it is an atmosphere which by it's incentive structure encourages participants to accuse each other of indiscretion, moral violations, treason, or violation of social norms without much regard for evidence. We may substitute "witch" for whichever is the most unpopular thing to be in a given place at a given time but the defining factor of an accusatory atmosphere is anyone can be accused of being "it" or "part of it" and then sanctioned whether by legitimate authorities or illegitimate authorities.
Accusatory atmospheres are very bad for growing communities
It probably is obvious and I don't need to say it but in an accusatory atmosphere any little mistake, any little accident, any slight indiscretion, can be used to divide people up. In a community around a blockchain it could be as simple as an atmosphere where people are encouraged by incentives or lack of disincentives to accuse each other of being "statists", or "corrupt", or whatever the worst thing to be is for that particular community. The technological debt factor is the fact that most developers don't really think about these factors even when considering the game theory. We know for example if coins are completely anonymous then dishonest games flourish and it's very easy to see how an entire community can fork, split apart, with both sides thinking the other is the corrupt side.
What can we do about this?
How can we avoid accidentally creating an accusatory culture? Our technologies which rely very much on reputation will give each reputation holder something to want to protect but at the same time a competitor could (just as in politics) seek to damage the reputations of the opposition as part of a dishonest strategy to win. How could we discourage this particular series of behaviors rather than encourage it?
One really important aspect is the ability to kick out badly behaving members from the community. Without exclusion it's really hard to have a good community.
The modern attention economy will run based on proof of work as Reputation of its intelligent producing agents.
Consensus building learning in "blockchained" communities can be a virus leading to decentralization initially led by the concept of open-source software as common property, the first "conspiracy" of private citizens against the State and the concept of private centralized software that make Code as Law for private profit and "back-doors" for stealing our privacy.