The wisdom of crowds is a well documented phenomenon. For instance, while individuals may be ignorant of the weight of a cow, averaging all their guesses together produces a surprisingly accurate answer. This can also be seen in the frequency that the Ask The Audience lifeline on the tv show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, was correct.
Democracy itself is built to take advantage of this phenomenon. In practice, most people are right about some things and wrong about others, but what ends up happening is that what they are right about tend to correspond to a common set of truths, while what they are wrong about tend to be fringe ideas that cancel out with each other. The rough agreement of truths allows democracy to triangulate the truth and leads to better governance, at least in theory. In practice our modern representative democracies only coarsely represent the preferences of many.
Direct democracy is an ideal that has never been tried on a large scale. The main reason for this is that the process is difficult to scale to large societies. However, the Internet and modern social media technologies are such that it is not unimaginable that these difficulties can be resolved cleverly.
At the same time, one of the major problems of our time is the increasing polarization and extremism created by online filter bubbles. Existing forms of social media contribute greatly to this condition by their distinct lack of moderation, or moderation by what amount to absolute dictators who can arbitrarily decide what is and isn’t acceptable.
Interestingly, the problem of fake news is most apparent on places like Facebook and Twitter, which are governed by for-profit corporations that in theory follow stringent moderation policies, but in practice allow a lot of questionable content to fall through the cracks. Perhaps more interestingly, fake news is much less a problem on Wikipedia.
What makes Wikipedia different from Facebook and Twitter? Aside from being a non-profit organization, Wikipedia’s moderation is essentially open sourced and community driven. Anyone can edit an article on Wikipedia, so why isn’t it an insane wild west of falsehoods, but instead a trusted source of knowledge that has put the old encyclopedias almost out of business?
In some sense, it is because Wikipedia is more democratic. Reddit is also somewhat democratic in that upvotes and downvotes can be aggregated to influence the filter. But Reddit still suffers from an old model of moderation, where individuals can capture a subreddit and become local dictators of their little island on the Internet.
The Dreamyth proposal is to create an online society that is self-governed and self-moderated. It seeks to solve the filter bubble problem by changing the way in which content is controlled. It seeks to apply a kind of direct democracy method to the problem, one that balances and checks the power of competing creators by allowing anyone who can see the content to vote on whether or not it stays up. And the innovation, the Glory system, allows people to bank the good will and approval votes of others towards them to pay for additional voting power that they can use when they think it’s needed.
In such a system, no one is a dictator. Everyone’s opinion counts in proportion to how much other people judge them to be good. If you worry that the tyranny of the majority will lead back to filter bubbles, just remember the difference between Wikipedia and Facebook or Twitter. The problem is not that bad ideas are being allowed to exist. The problem is that they aren’t receiving the negative feedback of being taken down in a fair and non-arbitrary way. The solution is to empower people, to crowdsource and democratize moderation.
It should be no surprise that Facebook and Twitter are worse than Reddit and Youtube because the former do not have downvotes or dislikes. Empowering this negative feedback to actually be able to delete offending posts if it exceeds the positive feedback, is the next logical step.
Dreamyth can be more than just another social network. It can be a place for creators to showcase their talents. It can be a market for user generated content. The core element though is voluntary participation in a direct democracy.