I remember you kyro. Have you gotten started on something? I think many of your questions would answer themselves one way or another after you start designing.

I remember you kyro. Have you gotten started on something? I think many of your questions would answer themselves one way or another after you start designing. But I'll take a stab. I'll skip 2 because I don't watch so much TV, reason being that in most cases, reading is the fastest way of absorbing information. 1. of course they are meaningful, because I know the people. The ties they create are digital. For those that bond with their friends online, FB facilitates it. For those that don't there's no difference (I'm in this group). I don't expose much of myself nor edit my profile much because I don't think it's worth the effort. 3. This problem I'm particularly interested in. The idea that services like these attract the LCD is a result of their design and not of operation. I think it is possible to circumvent this problem, but you must change the design concept. I recently attended the Wikimania conference and they talked about the absurd complexity of the rules now applied to Wikipedia. The oldies were talking about "back in the day" just like the old diggers. Spawning a new Wikipedia-like system isn't going to work; Citizendium is not the answer. You can spawn a new digg and it would still face the same problems. You can talk about spawning a new news.yc for non-startup content, and assuming it gets popular, it would still run into quality control problems. Plus, pg has a sizeable following, but there is only one of him: unless he clones himself for the new site, or creates a different system, his divested energy will result in one being less active than the other. A community news site that handles 10K users isn't going to handle 1M users similarly just by scaling the system or by implementing friends and leaders. There's that rule of 150 written in the Tipping Point book that says any group exceeding about 150 members will become difficult to manage(I shouldn't cite Gladwell but it's not an unfounded idea). A site of thousands of active members will, of course, run into management problems, but with a 10:90 active:lurker ratio, it works ok when your site has up to perhaps 20k users before you see any substantial, visible change in focus. Since not every user is active at the same time of day, you can increase the size of the virtual community, perhaps to something like 300 core members before the content changes dramatically. I don't know digg's numbers, but taking wikipedia as an example, with thousands of active editors, of course you will run into problems! And they think it's a result of lack of consensus over what is acceptible behavior or something. Seems pretty obvious to me, and I welcome challengers. When I said this at the conference nobody seemed to buy it though.