On Communities of Strangers
The Oracle has read 63 documents on this subject, the most recent dated 14 December 1996.
Questions put to the Oracle
Q Will strangers ever talk to one another at a great scale?
They do already. Usenet carries some twenty thousand newsgroups and the traffic doubles yearly. You may ask a question at midnight and wake to four answers, three of them correct and one of them furious.
The Oracle has observed that every group, on passing a certain size, acquires a person whose whole purpose is to spoil it, and that the group then spends more effort on that person than on its subject. The remedy is well understood: a moderator, and a key that deletes. Scale is therefore a solved problem. One simply appoints more moderators as the group grows.
Q What if every person had a page of their own?
Every person may have one now. GeoCities has given them away by the hundred thousand, free, arranged into twenty-nine neighbourhoods as though the Web were a town.
The question is not whether people will publish. They will publish enormously. The question is who reads it, and the Oracle foresees a great silence: a million pages, each with a visitor counter reading 000012, of which eleven visits are the author checking that the counter works.
Q Could one message reach a million people in an afternoon?
Yes, and it is called a chain letter, and it is already a nuisance. MAKE MONEY FAST has been forwarded so many times that the headers are longer than the letter.
But note that this only happens to messages that ask to be forwarded, which is to say the worthless ones. Nothing worth reading spreads that way. And nobody would ever build a machine whose entire purpose was to make it happen faster.