FYI, the email arrived in the spam folder of my GMail account :( As for actually reviving Agora, I'm in the category of players who joined the game once or twice, but ended up doing nothing, and I do not really have a suggestion on what to do from here. If there was such a plan to revive Agora, I might join again, with hopefully more success than on my previous tries, but that's about it.
OTOH I've been a long time watcher and even if most of the time I ignored the game, each time I actually took some time to follow the current events or to read some of the rules it has been a source of great enjoyment. IOW, thanks for everything! On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 12:13 AM, omd <c.ome...@gmail.com> wrote: > So, on the off-chance you haven’t heard already, over the last few days > there’s been quite a hubbub in the cryptocurrency community, owing to the > theft of around $50 million in “ether” (the Ethereum system’s currency) > from something called The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). > Brief explanation: The DAO, like all Ethereum “smart contracts”, is in fact > a small piece of code launched into the Ethereum blockchain. Once a > contract is launched, anyone can pay a small fee to call any public > function it declares, specifying the arguments and potentially including a > payment of some amount of ether; and the contract’s code is executed to > determine how it should react, potentially including updating its internal > state, sending people ether, and/or performing its own function calls on > other contracts. The actual program execution occurs on the machine of any > “miner” who wants to earn money by dedicating their CPU resources to the > network: the code and state is public, so anyone can execute it; the > Ethereum VM is deterministic, so everyone will agree on the result; and the > blockchain achieves decentralized consensus on the new state of the system. > > > Once launched, a contract’s code cannot be changed by anyone, even the > creator - unless it contains explicit provisions for self-amendment, which > many do. I’m a bit embarrassed that I didn’t realize, until seeing it > mentioned on Hacker News, that this amounts to a codenomic. An improved > codenomic, which doesn’t have to trust an administrator to host the service > without meddling. And in the case of the DAO, a codenomic in which tens of > millions of dollars were invested - which turned out to have a trivial > vulnerability allowing anyone to steal all the money. Which someone did, > and now there’s a big philosophical debate about intent vs. letter, soft > forks, and all sorts of other things you can Google. > > > Sorry, I’m being a bit long-winded. I’m not here to propose starting a > nomic on Ethereum, although that might be fun (to make a contract designed > to be a game rather than the custodian of a significant amount of money), > and I think there have been attempts to do so already. > > > But this email is titled “Future of Agora”. And I’m not suggesting Agora > become a codenomic. Rather, hearing about the DAO finally gave me the > impulse to write what I’ve wanted to write for a while - to point out that, > for the nth time, Agora is dead. But this time, really really dead. > > > I made a graph of mailing list activity by month: > > > > https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19e6QdFa6-AtFDc4sRKe1jVKCa4rS_fF0gDWwSLD7Y7k/edit#gid=1646044457 > > > I joined in April 2007. In retrospect, it was a good time to join: the > start of a yearslong trend of thousands of messages per month, the biggest > period of activity in Agora’s history since the mailing list started. > After that things declined a bit, but still no single month fell under 100, > and in 2013, due to the bidecennial, there was another spurt lasting about > half a year. > > > Since then, for three years or so, we’ve muddled along without much > activity, with the message count often falling under 100 or even under 50. > And now, for the first time ever since 2002, it’s reached 0 - for two full > months in a row, April and May, plus June (not in the chart) up to today. > > > When I joined it was my 15th birthday. Now I’m 24. > > > Does there ever come a time to call a game over, to put Agora out of its > misery? > > > It’s not that I want it to be over. My interest, presumably like many > other players’, has waxed and waned over the years, and after such a long > hiatus I for one would probably be pretty active if there were a new spurt > of activity. If some of the usual cadre of longtime players showed up, and > we could somehow recruit a bunch of new players, Agora could rise again. > > > But that’s really the issue - new players. We’ve never really been > effective in actively recruiting new players, as long as I’ve been around, > despite proposals over the years (may I call them slacktivist? :) to solve > the problem by defining an office responsible for solving it. They’ve > always just seemed to show up one by one, not that often, maybe as a friend > of an existing player or just someone who stumbled upon our website. They > post their registration, and for many of them that’s it. Some of them last > long enough to try to engage with the game for a few weeks, or even > months. A handful become longterm players. > > > And I suppose Agora can limp along that way, but I’d say the ideal player > count, the size best suited to its structure, is something like 20 active > players, far more than we've had anytime recently. Too few and things > start to stagnate, as we’ve had plenty of experience with: not enough > proposals come out, and all the office burdens start to seem overbearing. > To be honest, we should have switched to more modern state tracking systems > long ago, considering how much the office system has slowed things down and > confused people during times of fast-paced gameplay - though even after > switching it’s good to have someone responsible for making sure > everything’s right, if you have enough people. Too many players and we’d > run into problems like too many proposals for everyone to vote on, too much > noise on the mailing list to read it all - but those would be good problems > to have. > > > Why is Agora so bad at attracting players? Sure, the idea of nomic is > sort of niche, especially considering Agora’s tendency to focus more on > process than actual gameplay, but there seems to be something about it that > strongly appeals to some people, in our case especially programmers, and > there’s no shortage of programmers on the internet. Plus, BlogNomic, which > is more gameplay-oriented, has been significantly more active than Agora > over a similar period of time. I don't want Agora to become BlogNomic, but > it could take some hints rather than stubbornly remaining unchanged for so > long. > > > I think there have always been barriers to entry that aren’t really > necessary: > > > - First of all, from a technical point of view, the simple fact that you > have to sign up for three damned mailing lists to play, with two other ones > mentioned on the homepage, is probably a huge turnoff in the 21st century. > Not to mention that if you want to see existing activity before playing, > it’s split across three different archives, one per list, with an > old-fashioned-looking interface. > > > If Agora continues, agoranomic.org should have, right on the front page, > a forum-style thread listing, with all agora-* lists combined, with the > ability to send new messages from the web interface if you don’t want to > set up email. This is not that hard, technically speaking. A bit of an > uncommon use case - most web forum software doesn’t also have a full > email-based interface, with the notable exception of Discourse, which has a > stated goal of being usable as a mailing list but which is very bad at it. > But Hyperkitty, the Mailman 3 archiver, is relatively pretty and apparently > has a reply-on-web function, or I could write something custom. > > > - The rules have always been really long/verbose, hard to read due to > being in plaintext, and poorly organized from the perspective of a new > player trying to get the gist of the game, with few annotations to explain > in plain English what the bulky code-like text of the rule means. > > > This can be improved. I don’t think we can get rid of too much verbosity > in the ruleset without losing the soul of Agora, but we can make it easier > to understand. We could have an official glossary, official summaries, an > order to the rules that prioritizes meat (gameplay) over bones > (definitions). I’ve tried some stuff like this on occasions in the past, > as an unofficial Rulekeepor experiment, but it’s never been complete or > official. > > > And we should actively encourage players to join without reading all the > rules (the current website, which needs to be redone, says you should read > them). Once someone has started to understand and get interested in > Agora's quirky attitude toward "law", then it can be entertaining to read > through all the technicalities and definitions. But the best way to get > interested is by playing. And to understand how to play in practice, a > summary should be enough. > > > - We haven’t gotten the word out. > > > We have to use methods that will let us reach a large audience of > potentially interested people, not just rely on word of mouth, which will > never work very well in our player count range. IIRC, at least one of > Agora’s big bursts came after getting linked on Slashdot. Today there are > Reddit and Hacker News, and Agora might well reach the frontpage of an > appropriate subreddit or of HN, if submitted, but those aren’t > sustainable. As an alternative, why not go for real Internet ads? I could > pay for a Reddit ad campaign, or even Google ads. Target programmers. Of > course we’d need to improve the website first, as I described above. > > > (Incidentally, I’ve had agoranomic.org as my Twitter homepage for years, > but I don’t think anyone has actually joined from that. I have 200,000 > followers but they’re mostly old dead accounts.) > > > > So… I think I could say a lot more, but I told someone I’d do something > with them half an hour ago, so I need to wrap this up. Basically, with > respect to reviving Agora, while I could just do the usual thing and start > proposing things or assume some offices, I don’t want to muddle along > anymore. At this point I want Agora to get a proper rebirth - or die. > > > If it’s going to be rebirth, I want a real process. First a multi-step > plan to make big changes to both infrastructure and the game itself to > attract new players, and then a predecided date some time in the future to > have a big bang - get a decent number of longtime players to commit to > coming back on that date and actively participating for at least a month if > they possibly can, to provide enough catalyst for the reaction to become > self-sustaining. > > > Is anyone interested? Comments and questions appreciated. > -- Noé Rubinstein.
