Individual Linux distros fail, as do some websites or email servers - but the fundamental underlying protocols make sure no one entity exists that ruins everything.
Does anyone know of a good way to do something like that here?
Why is it so important whether money transactions were involved?
I didn't understand what you were getting at with the comparison, they seemed totally unrelated to me. I think I see now though. If I look at it a certain way I see "receiving content and then relicensing it" in both circumstances.
I think that the context which needs to be ignored to make them the same in that way is very relevant though - the devil's in the details. In one circumstance you are posting content under the agreement mentioned above, in the other you are receiving content from someone who has agreed to no such conditions.
Seems like the disconnect here is whether SO should be able to put the relicensing terms in their terms of use and have that be enough. Personally I lean toward yes, but could probably be persuaded in the other direction. Would a check box next to the answer box be enough consent do you think? Or do you feel no one has a right to relicense any content they haven't produced themselves?
That may be, but they didn't put such terms in their terms of use. They just retroactively changed the license. Or rather, they fraudulently misrepresent the license of the content. It would be like Github relicensing all content they serve under cc-by-sa. It's absurd.
>Or do you feel no one has a right to relicense any content they haven't produced themselves?
You can agree to all sorts of terms. I didn't. A huge number of contributors didn't. SO would have to go back to all contributors and renegotiate terms with them individually. Of course, no such attempt has been made.
In my first comment I said cc-by-sa 4.0 because I had just gone to the site footer to see what license they were using. I knew it was some form of creative commons, but I didn't know which one.
I didn't know until just now that they are changing (or trying to change) the license on all existing content from cc-by-sa 3.0 to cc-by-sa 4.0. That I doubt they can do and I very much disagree with the move even if they can.
Interestingly, they also appear to have unilaterally changed the license on all content from cc-by-sa 2.5 to cc-by-sa 3.0 in 2011. The comment on Jeff Atwood's answer at https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/95033 is fun.
So small sites will still fail, in fact they'll fail often, but the meta-media as a whole can continue. If anything, it forces them to be responsive because unhappy members will vote with their feet.
It also gets around many of the censorship problems that large sites have. Large sites don't want to make their algorithms or policies clear because there's a massive gain in gaming their system. A diverse collection of small sites is effectively immune to this: it's easy to game one site, but it doesn't get you much of anything.
There's still the expense of moderation, and I think it's where a meta-system shines. If you can draw moderators from anywhere, they're naturally disinterested. You can set up a standard set of procedures for how moderation is done without actually specifying what the rules are. The site owner has sole discretion as to what the rules are, and can override moderator decisions, limited by their willingness to micromanage and upset membership.
The incentive to moderate is that if you want to appeal a decision or otherwise request moderator attention, you must yourself do moderator duty to earn enough "civic duty" points. It's like jury duty, only more directly tit for tat. And I think a well designed system would help educate people as to why certain decisions are made, leading to greater investment.
I think there are huge technical barriers to such a scheme, especially building a UX that works across systems and dealing with not terribly technical site admins. Hell, I'm not even sure what the "meta-media" part of it is, whether it's discussions or interest groups or are there meta-sites that somehow overlay multiple real sites on common topics.
But it would be a fun project...
* Is there a more generic term than "social media" that would better include SO?
World-Wide Web.
As in, the WWW should be "heavily distributed over many small sites, with a common fabric, a meta-media, connecting them."
;-P
See also Project Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
That is StackExchange though...
I still like it for the antifragile nature of it.