The importance of gradual improvement
A lot of the time I feel like I should just reinvent everything, and fix all the problems with online forums at once. But that’s stupid and silly. The social evolutionary process that has led to our current generation of intellectual interaction software is much, much smarter than I am when it comes to figuring out what actually works. Now, I believe that natural selection hasn’t had a chance to operate on some forum features that would really make big improvements to the quality of discourse. And it may be that there really is no social demand for that kind of quality, and that many of my ideas that would otherwise work won’t end up working. But in order to take advantage of the critical mass of commenters necessary to really test out a new feature, I really have to be able to integrate it with accepted forms of content production. Things that actually do draw commenters, and bloggers. Otherwise it’s way too easy to miss the mark.
Another perk of incremental changes is that it becomes plausible to market the features to existing bloggers with existing communities, instead of having to displace all existing forms of blogging software.
And if I do this, feature by feature, eventually it’ll end up being very close to the ideal. That is, unless there are some strange barriers in the fitness landscape (not very likely, IMHO), i.e. some large upfront costs/risks to some features that would otherwise be sure things. Transition costs.
