[danaris]

> whoever figures out how to give authentic online experiences is going to be successful

The problem is, there is fundamentally no way to scale this.

The only way to give authentic human interaction with like-minded individuals is to connect real humans to other real humans who share interests. And as we've already seen over the first few ages of the Internet, once such a community scales past a certain size, it a) ceases to be a place where people can come to chat, discuss, and hang out with their interest-sharing friends, because there are just too many people for one person to know, and b) becomes a target for profit-minded interests who will cheerfully eviscerate any authenticity and connection the community brought if it will make them a small profit before the community crumbles and collapses.

So anyone trying to "give authentic online experiences" as a business model is going to have to accept that they are going to be, at best, a small, modestly profitable company. And given the state of things today, I very much doubt that this is in the cards.

[alaudet]

Scaling is a problem. But my mind keeps running in circles as to how you could do this. Maybe organically through a "web of trust" like gpg. Bob trusts Alice --> Alice trusts John, so Bob automatically trusts John. But then the complexity would kill it just like gpg and you would be sitting alone in your group chat. <grin>

Maybe if Alice gets out of line and starts trusting obvious bot accounts you can untrust her and automatically would remove any replies from the people she trusts.

Just having fun here.

[danaris]

I think if there's a way to make it work, it would have to involve restricting the sizes of individual communities—probably with a "soft limit" and a "hard limit". Above the "soft limit", people can't join independently, but people can still be invited by friends; above the "hard limit," people can't join at all.

Based on my understanding of current research on the topic, I'd say to put the "hard limit" at about 150 members, and the "soft limit" at somewhere between 75 and 100 (because people will really want to bring in their friends; in fact, that's a major part of the point, and an unqualified positive for the community!).

I can also say from my own experience of running a small browser-based game that is almost 100% driven by player-to-player interaction, you need a critical mass of people interested in active discussion to keep such a group going, but if you have too many the volume of messages becomes offputting and it's hard for new members to feel comfortable speaking up. ...And that it's really, really easy for small, vocal, aggressive cliques of people within a given group to ruin things for the rest.