Working with idolaters, infidels, and the impious: can interfaith discourse work?

[cellio]

I've seen interfaith dialogue work really well, kind of ineptly, and really, really badly.1 I've noticed some things that make a difference in where on the spectrum an effort is likely to fall. So, some observations.
To people who are interested in it at all, religion is generally an important

Comments

[cellio]

Oh wow. No, I had not seen that. Thank you for pointing it out.

And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.

And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before.

And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. [...]
And the [new users] weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. [...]

And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."

[...] Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow.

This. So much, this. This happens over and over and over.

Also, zing: "We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities."

His comments about one user/one vote are also interesting. I wish he'd done more with that -- that is, given that kind of voting structure, how does Slashdot or Reddit or Stack Exchange allow the core members to nonetheless enact what is good for the site? (It's entirely possible that "aside from really effective rabble-rousing, this is unsolved" is the answer. :-( )