I had a great lunch with an ecommerce veteran today and we were exchanging views on various things Internet. We discussed how some of the larger community sites, like eBay & Craigslist, or rating sites like CitySearch & Epinions, are running into issues with their communities where the threat of fraud or credibility of the reviews comes into question -- so much so that it impacts the growth of the community. Much better to figure out a way to leverage people's self-interest (with safeguards) than to depend on the altruism of others and put elaborate measures to prevent the gaming of the system (which becomes a cat and mouse game). Markets are a great way to do this. Most people are good and law-abiding so having a 'clean' community site is achievable but, as it scales, there becomes a greater incentive for bad apples to come out of the woodwork and game the system.
Communism & Marxism are great ideas theoretically but don't really scale well (easy to be Communist within a family but much harder in a nation).
Thanks to Greg for the interesting discussion & insights.
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