Explainer #1: “Implicit Feudalism” is why online communities feel like warring kingdoms

The audience for Platformocracy is turning out to be a mix of online governance specialists, tech industry professionals who are new to the space, and interested generalists. To try to help everyone, I’m starting an occasional series of Explainers introducing key concepts in online governance. If you’re an expert and see errors, please let me know at [email protected].

Implicit feudalism points out that the creator of an online community has absolute power, like a medieval monarch. They can delete posts, ban people, or kill the community outright, and cannot be removed from power. The community has no formal role in decision-making.

This started because early dial-up communities were hosted on physical computers in people’s houses, giving the owner the ultimate power to just unplug the server if they didn’t like what was happening. This set a pattern that has continued to the present day. It can be seen in WhatsApp group chats, Facebook groups, Discord servers, and many others.

Nathan Schneider, associate professor of media studies at University of Colorado, Boulder. Schneider was previously a reporter, where he covered the Occupy Wall Street movement, and has written books about cooperative enterprise and online democracy. He is director of the Media Economies Design Lab, and a member of Social.coop, a Mastodon server funded and run cooperatively by its members.

Implicit feudalism undermines real-world democracy, not just online communities. Life under absolute power stops people from learning critical democratic skills of deliberation and compromise. If your only options are to petition the lord of the manor to grant your request or leave for another community run by a different feudal lord, you are being conditioned to a world of autocracies.

In 2017, I joined NJ 11th for Change, a new non-partisan political organization advocating for transparency, responsiveness, and accountability from our Congressional representative. The group was founded as a Facebook group that quickly grew to over 7,000 passionate citizens. About a dozen of us volunteered as an informal board, serving as group admins online and organizers in the real world.

Unfortunately, the original creator of the Facebook group didn’t agree with our approach. He thought that because he created the online group, he should have final say over the direction of the entire movement. He resented how the informal board was pushing back on his decisions, and that we were becoming better-known in the real-world community than he was.

After a nasty leadership meeting where it was clear he was outnumbered, he booted us all from the group and announced a new leadership plan to the mystified community. He had no interest in compromising or bringing us back. I even tried using my industry connections to ask Facebook employees to intervene (petitioning a higher feudal lord, basically) but there was no policy for overruling a group creator.

We had to start a new group from scratch and re-assemble the original community, which cost us months of momentum. The original group became a ghost town, but its creator kept it going with a confusing duplicative name, until he was persuaded to hand it over six years later.

If this sounds like just a typical intra-group squabble, consider that the candidate we ended up backing, Mikie Sherrill, won her election, and is now the Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey. We avoided the worst outcomes, but implicit feudalism meant that one man’s fit of pique over a group of 7,000 came close to changing the politics of a state of 9 million.

Ask the platforms hosting your online communities to build support for change of control. A group of admins or a sufficient segment of the full group should be able to take away the creator’s founding power. This would give people a choice of community governance, which would force owners to act more democratically to keep their members and/or position of authority.

Change-of-control features would raise a bunch of useful follow-up questions like who can call for a vote, who is allowed to vote, how a vote should be conducted, and how often a new vote is allowed or required. Answering these questions will require deliberation and compromise, the skills that people need to be effective citizens in a democracy.

Nathan Schneider’s stuff! He’s really good.

Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].