In Search of an Online Utopia

How will that work in practice?

In practice it’s going to work a lot like Wikipedia, which is that things only get included if they are approved of by the community in some ongoing process. Hopefully, it involves a reasonable amount of dialogue and discussion. Search is very different from an encyclopedia, so there aren’t a lot of exact analogies. But one of the things that I definitively learned was that we [initially] basically overdesigned for all sorts of problems that people really didn’t have. That’s a very common mistake on the Internet.

I think the right answer is not to design [to prevent] the spammer, but to throw it all open. Then if we start to see a problem developing, we can think about ways to narrowly slice out that problem. It’s very analogous to what you want in ordinary life and society. You don’t want a police state, you want people to be able to speak their minds. Somewhere between a police state and anarchy, you’ve got good governance. It’s always a messy process.

You’re obviously an optimist.

Yes, pathologically optimistic.

What about user-generated content? Is that going to put journalists out of business?