Right, Backfeed seems to be a system to cluster people according to their value judgements. The result should be a fractal system of overlapping communities, a fractal society. Individuals can be parts of several communities at once, but they may want to focus their activities in which they get the most value. If we formalize value, then this the value of a community for an individual is its share of the total value in the community. Misalignment with the value judgements of the community will reduce that share, so it seems rational to branch out into smaller communities in which alignment is higher. In the worst case, people will focus on doing stuff on their own, if they don’t find a fitting community they can align with.
Also, people will tend to avoid communities with low total value, since their share in those will be low due to low total value, even if they are perfectly aligned with them. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. If you follow a bad strategy that creates little value, teaming up with others who follow the same bad strategy won’t help. You really need to switch to a different strategy to increase your evolutionary fitness. Of course, if it’s a strategy that requires the collaboration of many people, then teaming up should be encouraged, since then the effectiveness of the strategy should reflect positively on the results of the community.
It’s important to note that this system creates incentives for individuals to adapt their own expressed value judgements to those of the community they are most in alignment with (or gain most value from), if the prospect of creating a smaller community, in which their alignment is maximized seems unlikely to work out – for example because the individual in question is not a good leader, or holds too uncommon views.
In a sense “value generating communities” may be a generalisation both of economic and political organisations. The value people gain from communities can be both economic and political in nature. What we get in the end, is a network society fuelled by a network economy, in which self-organisation, and adaptation processes drive progress for individuals and networks alike.
Since Backfeed provides feedback on expressed value judgements, it drives forward the process of fractalisation in a fractal network society. That is something that Quantified Prestige doesn’t do as much, because the value expression power is basically equally distributed among the peers of a QP network, and there is no embedded feedback mechanism on your expressed value judgements.
But then this difference seems to come from the different main functions of Backfeed and QP:
- Backfeed is there to create a fractal network society
- Quantified Prestige is there to create digital abundance (via currencies such as GeoFlux)