Emerging Digital Morals

A *single* digital moral has emerged on Cent in response to a specific post. Essentially Centians (Cent users) are not down with posts *and* users that simply request Centians provide a specific rating or leave a positive review about some product sight more or less unseen.

In and of itself it's nothing special, and this is probably why my observation hasn't elicited any reaction.

But it is damn interesting to me, for a few reasons.

First of all since there is a bounty attached to the post – around $10 so not nothing – and Centians are all basically anonymous, just a few days ago it wouldn’t have been inconceivable to think that this sort of request could have been pretty effective.

But, I think I can now say with a reasonable degree of certainty that such posts and requests will end up being a waste of money for anyone who tries to post these kinds of things.

The second reason why the emergence of a digital moral amongst a band of loosely tied, anonymous, decentralized users is interesting is because it emerged on a site that offers very little in the way of direction or instruction to users on how to use the site. There are no real explicit warnings against certain actions. There isn't even a way for users to follow one another.

But all of that doesn't really matter since the site design is hella fleek. It is clean, simple, and straight-forward. And as I wrote on Twitter, I really think that the Centian morality that has begun to manifest itself can be directly attributed to the good design of the site.

As I've written about before though [here], the design needs to continue to allow for new ideas and use cases to manifest out of the original culture and associated infrastructure. Otherwise there will be a breakdown, or in Mumfordian terms 'de-materialization' will occur. For a project like Cent this would look like users defecting to other networks that better incorporate the urges and impulses behind new ideas seeking expression.

Here's hoping for continued timely as well as thoughtful expansion a top good design.