Collective Apathy and the Internet

Blink. You read Reddit, right? Have you never noticed that every time there's an outrageous story, everyone on Reddit bands together and does something about it? Dusty the cat? The ReMax debacle? That woman who got her cruise cancelled and the Redditors sent enough to get her a new one? Also, http://www.cracked.com/article_17170_8-awesome-cases-internet-vigilantism.html . This is pretty impressive. If I'd, say, put a big poster up in a school about Dusty the Cat or ReMax, I doubt the students would have been able to mount half as coherent or overwhelming a response as the Internet did.

And Anonymous versus Scientology was pretty impressive too.

All of these have some things in common. They're responses to a single outrageous incident, they're things that the mainstream media doesn't cover, and they don't take a huge time commitment to solve. So there is a big difference between them and, say, fighting world hunger.

But what I gather from these examples is that anonymity and the bystander effect do not suddenly change the incentive structure for people online. Possibly the best known Internet action-taking campaign ever was the anti-Scientology one perpetrated by...Anonymous.

I would suggest we shift our inquiries in the direction of why the Internet is so good at Dusty the Cat style operations and so bad at end world hunger style operations. I think it probably has to do with the way people use the Internet itself: short attention spans and novelty-seeking.

On the other hand, the Internet can pull through for people long-term: witness Howard Dean, Barack Obama, Ron Paul, and "netroots". So maybe it has more to do with the fragmented nature of the Internet. Reddit is a natural place for Ron Paul fans to get together and organize Ron Paul related things, but there are lots of fragmented communities and none of them is specifically focused on world hunger. Nor would a sudden interest in solving world hunger on one community's part spread to another.

I don't know. Don't have a specific answer. Just think we need to shift direction away from "Why is the Internet so bad at this?" because it isn't

The key problem is not doing collective action, but agreeing on what collective actions we think are worth doing. Governments excel at overcoming coordination problems to choose and implement collective actions. Its problem is that it often chooses badly.

Let's first assess the current state of the art. The Facebook Causes application does not meet all your criteria, but it hits a few pretty well. It puts money front and center, and tracks the amount you've donated, as well as the amount you've "raised" by referring friends who then donate. It also provides a number of means by which to tell friends about causes -- you decide what seems least annoying.

I notice someone's already registered The Institute Which Must Not Be Named

It seems to me that the open source community has this problem effectively conquered. ESR's Homesteading the Noosphere is a pretty good analysis of how.

But mostly I just hand you an open, unsolved problem: make it possible / easier for groups of strangers to coalesce into an effective task force over the Internet,

Solution: wait 5 years for internet connection speeds to increase by an order of magnitude and for everyone to have ultralight netbooks with good webcams on them, and let groups convene in a much-improved version crossover of second life and facebook in exactly the same way that groups of hunter-gatherers convened on the savannah.

It is an elegant solution, because rather than attempting to work around our barely-evolved-monkey brains, it merely changes the internet to be more like the EEA.

I'm trying to use a primitive version of this by disallowing comments on my blog and forcing people to comment on it on facebook, where they have a fixed identity and where their social circle overhears the conversation.

I couldn't help but notice that Eliezer's list of idea up there described Kickstarter to a T. I have no idea when Kickstarter was launched. I'd be using Kickstarter myself for just about everything if I wasn't having difficulties getting my Amazon account working correctly.

If the goal of promoting rationality conflicts with the goal of creating a taskforce, why expend energy reconciling those goals? Purchase utilons separately! Become a charismatic leader. Make inspirational speeches on YouTube. Give orders to a close circle of lieutenants. Go all the way.

www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/ seems to be doing alright.

Sorry about the broken link 'n' stuff.

It's been proven that communities built on small world principle (social networks) scale well. I know some people well, and each of them know some people well, and so on. When I need help or whatever I tell that to my closest friends and ask top pass it on. That's how chain letters work.

Here is one proposal:

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/03/yes-we-plan-how.html

Their idea seems to be to combine a social networking site with facilities for coordinating action and a karma system. If it can be designed in such a way that signals are honest, karma is fair and the system becomes widely-used, I imagine it could be highly effective. On the other hand, Facebook and co. give free karma that's instantly visible to all your associates, so I fear it will be very difficult for the new site to invade the market.

I have invited 27 friends to the SIAI facebook cause.

Let's try to all invite roughly that many. Post your accomplishments in this thread.