Lot of good thoughts there whacked. I also tend to be biased against institutions and hierarchies, although I have a similar bias against youtube comments and

Lot of good thoughts there whacked. I also tend to be biased against institutions and hierarchies, although I have a similar bias against youtube comments and trollishness (which tend to be the same things). I think one of the main reasons that none of these basic problems has been solved is that the general mindset on when approaching them approximates your own. That is "we can jump out of the traditional way of thinking about roles." I wish that were true, but the traditional way is the traditional way for a reason. It worked, providing necessary efficiency in a specific context. Now, I would argue in an 'ideal discussion system' there would be a variety of different contexts that would be modeled in different ways. This means that you have to have flexibility in the individual implementation, which is part of the reason I was exploring the possibility of lisp list strings in transactional databases below on this thread. The problem with the arbitrarily-tiered system as I see it is that it relies on tagging. This may work in a smallish community but then you still have a problem when what you or I might consider trolls put youtube-style comments into this discussion on social modeling. The main way that this has been dealt with is to have evolving communities that focus on very technological subject material. By keeping things at a sufficient level of abstraction, one is able to create a new tech-specific language that must be mastered before one can participate. In other words, one has created a de facto tiered system. The dark side of this is that the need to force discussion into tech-specific language prevents people from having substantial discussion about fundamentals. And fundamentals (like how people discuss things, or would like to discuss things) are often more important than the latest trends in functional programming. So I would say that Slashdot and Reddit, though good models, encourage a certain faddishness with respect to the abstract language which they enforce. As for responsibilities being incremental instead of predefined, I have had similar thoughts. I think the problem (as articulated in political philosophical tomes as well as other places) is that the populace may shift unless it has an investment in something in particular. Usually this investment is in property. With the online world one would need something like core users which are in some way invested in the success or failure of a particular online venue. Once one had core users (property owners) then there are a number of fluid mathematical systems one could employ for the evaluation and promotion both of good content and good users. I was going to post more philosophical musings related what I see as the Turing Project, but I think Pg deleted my last comment on the topic and this post is quite long already.