I really find it interesting that a concensus seems to have emerged here that it is
consequences that might help bring an order out of the anarchic chaos. My instinct upon reading the original idea was the exact opposite.
That is, I worried that if the experiment succeeds in bringing about a stable anarchic order, there will be limitations on what it can tell us about real life precisely because unlike real life, the stakes here are
just so small. No one has anything to gain but an online ego-stroke by banning you without provocation.
I'll admit that I'm
far more interested in the results of Phase I than Phase II. I'm not even too concerned about the ban-and-return thing. Think of it as death and reincarnation; if we're lucky, we can play out the evolution of human morality as we slowly stop banning each other and over multiple iterations, realize there are cooperative strategies with which the game can be played.
To bring us sadly away from the philosophical side and back to the boring technical side, my biggest concern is automated spamming which could bring the server and the experiment to a grinding halt. We should find some way of excluding machines and professional spammers from our little social experiment.
For Phase II, what might really make it interesting is if the most popular forumer can become an admin and start changing the very rules of the game (though his powers would somehow have to be kept proportional to his 'mandate' among the other users.) It might be fun if we TFPers thought of a way to secretly signal each other amidst the internet riffraff, and then slowly mounted a campaign to take over the board, seeing how long it would take for us to convince the other users to allow us to enslave them.
