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RE: Stream of Consciousness and Social Networking
Never apologize for a quality ramble!
I think you're on to something there. The incentive of the system didn't really enter into how I was thinking about things, and it probably deserves consideration. Upon re-reading my post, it does take things a little more "out of our hands" than I'd intended.
Thanks! Glad it was helpful.
I've been slowly coming to the realization that how you incentivize people can really affect how people behave in aggregate. Take an anonymous chat site vs one that attaches some form of identity, eg. this or reddit. In both sites you're going to get people who are well-intentioned and people who are not, but on a site like reddit you're probably less likely to see that kind of behavior.
A better example might be the problem of toxic gaming communities - I'm sure we've all heard of/seen/experienced in some capacity the kind of bullying that can happen. In order to solve this problem, you can't really just ask everyone to behave nicely, that won't work. So, people who design the system spend time thinking how to incentivize player behavior toward less toxicity. Extra Credits actually has some really good videos on this subject specifically which I highly recommend watching:
I guess in that context it's not out of our hands entirely - it's dependent on who organizes the system and how they set it up to influence behavior.