Background
There are a number of experiments underway with membership and rank based collectives in Kusama and Polkadot - the first was Kappa Sigma Mu (Kusama issue #1: Treasury burn, Kappa Sigma Mu and the richest collective you've never heard of), followed by The Fellowship, with more on the way see Ecosystem Technical Fellowship Workshop.
The Fellowship is a member organisation existing on-chain whose statutes are partially governed by blockchain logic. In this sense, it may be considered similar to the Kusama Society, another purely logical organisation with both on-chain (autonomously enforced) and off-chain (via well specified social convention) components to its rules of operation. Fellowship Manifesto
Collectives are at their simplest an aggregate of people who bond over shared interests, values and even a sense of humour - at its core, this function of aggregating crowds, at hyper-local and supra-national scale has proven over time to be the internet’s primary super-power.
Though a collective can begin with an explicit direction and could be regarded as a directed entity, often purpose and the impact that follows emerges organically from within an aggregate group, as shared interests first foster trusting relationships between strangers, that leads to friendship and then ultimately to creative and collaborative endeavours.
A famous recent example of interest area based communities coordinating rapid and unexpected real-world impact was the /wallstreetbets sub-reddit which drove up the price of Gamestop stock by 8,000%, putting a large hedge fund out of business in the process.
Collective intelligence, diversity of ideas and flagging
Discourse (the open source platform that this forum uses) offers the ability for communities with shared interests to create public forums, allowing members to flag posts they believe are ‘off-topic’ or that conflict with the forum’s code of conduct.
Flagging via community moderation is a useful tool for removing extreme, hateful or explicit content, but can also be used as a tool for censorship in subtle and blunt ways.
In communities oriented around tokens and token based treasuries, there is often a direct financial incentive to flag comments and contributors who critique strategies that would otherwise benefit the status quo’s short term interests.
This behaviour can play out in petty, or annoying ways for those who become the subject of coordinated attacks - such as erroneous flagging or nasty DMs, but as with most areas of the attention economy, as the stakes rise and perceived threats grow - often amplified by dog-whistles from influential media personalities, things that begin as ‘fun’ tend to descend into bullying.
Red Flag Collective (RFC)
I would like to suggest (half jokingly) a (playful) design for an experimental ranked collective that can be established on Kabocha’s parachain using a simple, optimisic pure proxy design such as that proposed by Shokunin.
Membership would be gained via Proof of Flag, simply screengrab your flagged comment, share it with the collective and it will be memorialised as a soulbound NFT held in the collective’s shared reserve of cultural collateral.
Value proposition
RFC exists to:
-
Raise awareness of the role of flagging in subduing conversation that may have strayed off-topic, but into novel territory. Sometimes the OP finds the comment On-Topic, but other members have deemed comments Off-Topic, which seems a strange power structure.
-
shine a light on the echo chamber nature of community conversations, with the aim of encouraging lateral thinking
-
to offer a shared space for an emerging class of flagged DotSama citizens.
For Polkadot this serves the useful purpose of exporting independent thinkers to a distant colony, allowing the culture to stay conservative and risk free.
For Kabocha/Kusama this allows us to attract the unwanted idiots, savants and bad actors - rather like Australia.
