Female teens are WAY smarter than Congress and financial regulators


Funny how free choice works better
I loved this article because it illustrates freedom of choice so well. Emphasis added.

At first, Chief Executive Officer Dan Porter and his enforcement officer and community manager, Joseph Alminawi, took the Chris Dodd approach to regulation. They made lots and lots of rules, and then tried to enforce them.

The two created a list of banned words such as “rape.” Players commenced saying “grape” for rape. After “grape” was banned players wrote “r4pe” and so on, until the list of banned words reached an unenforceable 9,000.

In addition, the OMGPOP discovered that publicly scapegoating wrongdoers had a counterproductive effect. Once other rogues heard of a vigilante, they didn’t want to shun him. They wanted to join him -- even create a tough new gang to hijack the sweet culture of OMGPOP.

<snip>

So Porter and Alminawi took a different tack. They involved players in the game, in management, even. Premium members, who have spent sufficient hours on the site, get to test new games, for example.

And, like the New York Stock Exchange before the Securities and Exchange Commission, they tried to get players to police one another. Banning still happened. But management worked anonymously and played on the deep human desire not to be excluded from a desirable tribe.

One other thing.

It worked. Without pages and pages of rules and false promises of absolute safety and absolute security. With people taking responsibility for themselves and their choices.

Amazing isn't it?

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - July 19, 2010 at 12:01 PM  Tag


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