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- As the web-governance debate continues to rage on both in tech and politics, online communities are now largely caught in between an authoritarianism-anarchism duality: strict enforcement of community guidelines vs. letting the people do whatever they want. Attempts at moderating the community are always done heavy-handedly, while not doing enough leads to the degradation of the civility and composure of the community overall. Striking an ideal balance between the two is extremely difficult, short-lived, and largely unteachable as a skill. As advanced as our technologies have become, shouldn’t there really be a better way to handle our content and interactions online?
It turns out that there actually is: the web can simply imitate the ways in which the democratic process works, both in ideology and in function. In democratic societies we allow our representatives’ positions to expire after a few years (like a timeout event, one kind of designed crash), in hopes that someone new will bring new possibilities and ideas for the future to come. Using expirations as means for feature-building, temporal designs have the potential to systematize the process of community and content moderation in ways new and novel.