I've been going back and reading through the development history of Tildes, since I only joined a month ago. I've tried to understand the consensus of the community on where people want Tildes to go, how it should be managed, the preferred participant group and so on.

As I proceed, I've been drawn back again and again to the idea of any social media platform being a "commons", as in The Tragedy of the Commons. What Tildes becomes is not amenable to a purely technical solution, using the same logic with which the "Tragedy" essay approached population growth on Earth.

When we participate in a platform, we're utilizing a common resource pool of attention and management resources. Our desired amenity is civil intellectual congress, in a space with a regulated noise level, patrolled for egregious misbehavior. We consume and contribute resources to the commons.

There are increasing "NIMBY"-ish concerns that this amenity will be destroyed as the Tildesphere grows, as new users somehow demand attention in ways that fail to reach the quality of the established groups' contribution, or as behavioral excursions increase beyond the capacity of whatever control mechanisms we choose. Again, these are classic commons-management concerns.

Elinor Ostrom, an economist who studied the "Tragedy of the Commons" problem, identified eight "design principles" of stable local common pool resource management:

1. Define clear group boundaries.

I have no answers for Tildes as a whole - there's still a great deal of discussion about whether this should be a small, exclusive site, or gated, or open.

For sub-groups, I'd suggest no blocking of people (I appreciate and have used exclusive safe spaces, but private/gated groups just get unmanageable on an open platform, especially when there's no identity verification), only definition of what content categories are welcome/unwelcome.

[One more idea - the probationary/noob sandbox group, that's heavily moderated, with a graduation program for broader access. Getting "sent" back here could be a graduated punishment as under (6) below.]

2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.

See #8 below - I'm proposing a hierarchical inheritance of rules from the broadest group to the smallest, without any ability to block that inheritance. Subgroups can create new additive rules tailored to their needs, but they can't opt out from what we've decided is good for everyone.

3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.

[I don't have policy-making ideas here, other than a broad ideological commitment to the idea that democratic rule-making generally does better, as long as the parties at interest express proposed rules clearly and we have a forum and period of time to discuss the impact of proposed changes.]

4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.

This could be a tough problem; for instance, the endless debate about NSFW material. If a subgroup decides its own strategy for defining "NSFW" that may not meet a broader standard, and says, "well, this is our space, we think it's high-quality content, we're not violating any laws, and we're not putting it in front of anyone else", I can't think of a good reason why the Tildes community as a whole shouldn't respect that. At the same time, the community as a whole should have the right to enforce broader rules if the subgroup can't contain behavior that's unacceptable elsewhere.

5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.

We're already doing that, essentially by reading and responding to each other.

However, as subgroups form, it's going to become more difficult to remain aware of what's brewing in the dark corners. The issue on Reddit is that behavioral norms drift the farther from visibility a group becomes, until the groups' toxic behaviors overspill. It may be helpful to have moderators who have cross-group powers.

6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.

Right now, there are mainly two blunt tools, outside of the polite PM warning - block post, ban user.

Would a user flagging system (yellow button with 24-hour expiration (postings have visible "user has misbehaved" warning), red button with 3 day expiration (no posts), temp ban with one week expiration, permaban) be worth considering?

It may be worth doing a randomly-selected peer jury, that has the ability to arbitrate purely interpersonal disputes, or decide lesser methods for expiating violations of community norms other than banning.

7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.

I have few suggestions, as the community is small enough that moderation hasn't really been delegated or framed yet. Nor have we had a seeming urgent threat that needs to be contained - doxxing/personalised threat of violence, raging flame war that threatens to polarize the whole community and cause mass exodus, etc.

The "cost" of moderation and requesting content blocking/user ban, or unblock/unban, would be better addressed by the experienced Reddit moderators here.

8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

We have proposals for moderation and community rules within subgroups.

My thought is that we have a rules inheritance structure - the global Tildes rules apply everywhere, "~life" may add to the rules but not block any of the higher ones, and so on. This helps prevent lawless bubbles.

While many of these principles are at least partially considered in much of the discussion to date, I'd like to propose that we start thinking about how they can be applied to create a sustainably-growing community. I don't have brilliant ideas for doing this, but sometimes its helpful to have a specific design framework for approaching a problem.

My apologies if this is an unwelcome proposal and/or retreads old ground, but I'm hoping it's food for thought and discussion.