People can be anonymous but still accountable. Require users to post a cryptocurrency bond to post, and let others lay bets against the user's future score in some sort of crowd-sourced karma system. This lets other users gain if they successfully predict that the user's post will be disapproved of (get paid for reporting, e.g. obvious spam!) while conversely rewarding the user for good content that others are maliciously trying to bury or "cancel".

Ok. Who is the arbitrator then? A centralised party? If not, then maybe people who stake the most? Because that way you can literally pay for the right to decide what is "truth".

The best (or at least, most successful) answer to this has come through federation. Platform owners are allowed to create and moderate their own groups with their own distinct rules and regulation. From there, each group decides which of the other groups it would like to interact with, as well as ones that it would like to ignore. The result is a system where everyone can live happily; 4chan trolls can federate with 4chan trolls, mainstream instances can block objectionable content, and people who want to use both can freely make accounts for either group. The result is a pretty good balance of freedom with highly-moderated content, even highly sensitive groups have had a pretty good experience using this tactic, since if all else fails the group can defederate from everyone else and choose only to interact with other group members, or selectively federate with other groups that share their same values.

It reminds me of the democratic bus analogy. A bus with no driver and everyone with a steering wheel. All the input gets averaged out. Such a bus would get nowhere.

Reminds me of this https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/17/5418690/play-this-twitch-...

They did manage to get through some of the game at least!

Has anyone ever tried this? Sounds like a fascinating experiment. Of course it's basically all game theory. If a critical mass of people cooperated it could work.

I read it in a really old science magazine at a family gathering, and I think it was an article on democracy by some science institute. That’s all I remember. It would be an interesting thing to research, but it should be in the literature already.

Is this an already implemented system, or is this a potential technology?