Yes we are still talking about Facebook. In regards to boiling the ocean, it is a hugely-complex system involving billions of people all interacting in million

Yes we are still talking about Facebook. In regards to boiling the ocean, it is a hugely-complex system involving billions of people all interacting in millions of various dynamic subgroups using technology sometimes in ways even the designers can't anticipate. There's that. No, this historian idea would not work. We need to look at these examples from a CS perspective, not from a historical one. Those guys wouldn't have a clue. You'd end up with 50 essays and a lot of nothing. Put a different way, what we want is a collection of generic classes that we could instantiate that would describe all of those systemic failures. That's it. You could do that in an afternoon, a week, or a year. I don't think it is as long as a year. But like all coding practices, the key here is a small group and agreed-upon code. This isn't a sample-the-universe problem. Perhaps a way of looking at it is that yes, it's an ocean. It's an ocean of oceans we have to boil. Tech, people, and all of that beyond anybody's ability to grasp. But because it's so huge, we're free to then come at this in much the same way as mathematicians began reasoning about types of infinities. You don't have to know the infinity or collect all of the information required in order to effectively reason about it. I'm not talking about a big-bang, monolithic solution to social media. I'm talking about a few commandos arriving on a strange beach, taking a look at their surroundings, coming up with some heuristics, then testing them. It's not a long, drawn-out complex process. In fact, just the opposite. (But it is a fundamentally different kind of problem than computer folks are normally exposed to. We're looking for quick set of heuristics to test, not an accurate or complete definition of the overall problem and solution. We use CS knowledge and complex systems understanding to make informed categorical guesses that we can then test) Hope that makes sense. I'm outta here. EDIT: You may be asking for a solution to the FB/Social Media problem. I am saying that the best I think we can do is come up with a workable way to score possible solutions. That's it. Since it's scoring, we could use the Great Pumpkin or something more formal. I'm voting for more formal.