Implicit Feudalism of Online Communities
Discussion
Nathan Schneider:
"Alongside whatever else mothers and sons talk about, I have begun receiving regular updates on the governance of my mother’s neighborhood garden club. They make me jealous.
The club has survived from the heyday of suburban housewives—which my mother, as a retired government employee, never was. She is currently her club’s president. She describes the debates, the subtexts, the meetings, and what they’ve achieved through it all. As she does, my mind drifts to my own recent encounters with governance: running a 500-person email discussion group, lurking among open-source software communities, or reporting on contemporary social movements. No online group I’ve been part of can hold a candle to the simple and effective rule-set that has governed the garden club since the 1960s. Few online groups will last so long.
The club’s bylaws occupy eight pages in an annually printed, 38-page handbook, which also has chapters on “hospitality” and “flower arranging.” The structure should be familiar: articles, sections, and enumerated subsections. The language is formal, with lots of “shall” statements and capitalized terms. The club members don’t normally talk this way with each other. But when they have decisions to make or conflicts among them, they can flip to those pages and find a path forward.
Most neighborhood garden clubs have something similar. Most online communities do not.
The Internet has been plagued by a phenomenon I call “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for generating absolutist fiefdoms. Think about it: When was the last time you participated in an election for a Facebook Group, or sat on a jury for a GitHub project? Implicit feudalism is how platforms nudge users to practice (and tolerate) nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.”
From email lists to Subreddits, the feudal norms are so pervasive that we don’t even notice them. Admins punish other users for transgressions with the tactics of dictatorships, like censorship and exile. Ordinary users have no means of holding admins themselves accountable, short of asking for interventions from whatever corporation owns the platform. Yes, users can leave and choose another group, but often that is not as easy as it sounds, if the people they need to interact with are all there. Admins are free to make decisions capriciously and with no consultation. We treat this as acceptable.
I have experienced implicit feudalism as a hand tied behind my back. In my stints as a community administrator, I have tried to use my power to encourage democracy, and it’s very hard. Neither the features of our tools nor the norms we expect do much to equip us for this. What makes a decision legitimate? How much consultation with users is enough? Where traces of online democracy do exist, like in Wikipedia or the Debian operating system, it has emerged through extensive planning and custom software. The default is feudal."