Relationship between community members and its policies

Main article: Community

The ratings system will enable the formation of communities and the creation of policies for their members. Policy adoption means that all members, even the ones that favored other policies, have agreed to be bound by the policy once it is created. This binding of participants to the community is fairly standard but in our case it results from a conscious choice among participants. No one is, by default, a member of a community they didn’t choose. There is no notion of being “born into” a community to which you then have obligations. And, generally speaking, you can leave the community you are in and join another one.

This point is an interesting one in and of itself. Joining a community will entail, in essence, a contract which is freely agreed to. The contract will have provisions in it regarding the individual’s obligations, benefits and rights, the conditions under which they can leave, the penalties imposed on them for contract violations, etc. However, let’s suppose that a contract imposes excessive restrictions, penalizes too harshly, etc. (eg “stupid” is a bad word. You agree to be killed for using it). We would suppose such a contract would gain no adherents but it might. We could have a set of system-wide rules, ie a “constitution”, that don’t permit contracts of this sort, or do but clearly label them as being in violation of our rules. In order to avoid “hand of god” situations, communities could voluntarily subscribe to the system-wide constitution. Another option along these lines is to identify the unacceptable elements of extremist contracts and simply allow members to override their own contract by invoking our constitution. Regardless of the specific mechanism, the idea is to establish a philosophy of free association and moderation in contracts.

This is not to say that communities can’t be formed that are extremist in their views. In the name of freedom we would tolerate, for instance, racist views. Such a community could create racial rules for admittance (eg whites only), for example, and rate views expressing racial tolerance negatively. Such a group might be given to hate speech within it which might be rated highly. Again, there would be nothing the “system” could do to prevent this except rate such a group (and its members) negatively. Or, if the group has subscribed to the higher constitution, agree to some form of sanctions and prescribed therein. Ultimately, our hope, as we’ve expressed before, is that members of groups like this would be motivated to seek a higher rating by venturing out of the group and being amenable to informed persuasion.