I guess a question could be asked about whether Hacker News has had any impact at all. Has it brought people together, in ways that has fostered new innovation or the creation of companies or approaches to ideas, or resulted in any political lobbying whatsoever on any front?
Almost regardless of how impact is quantified, the answer is going to be yes.
Looking at any influential forum within any given vertical, that same pattern is repeated over and over.
Impact is material and real, when enough people with a shared interest come together.
Could the impact have been more measurable if the technology that powers forums been more supportive of the users needs? Again it's hard to answer that software that more easily helps pull people together in the real (as well as in the virtual) world and strengthen those bonds within a community wouldn't have more impact than software that didn't.
Forums are impactful, and do bring about advances. But currently only in small groups and without the impact or advances being accessible to other groups. The question isn't whether this happens in forums, but whether it's possible to encourage it to happen and what may emerge if it happens more often in similar ways. Could forums be used as a testing ground for new political structures within large groups of people, could they be used to evolve and prove those structures, and could the mechanisms of self-organisation within a forum be mapped back onto the real world.
It's not as crazy a thought as you might imagine, the seed is there and the tools do not support the way people are already trying to work. The tools today hold people back from what they naturally try to do, but if the tools supported people better things could be different.
Both HN and Facebook are not regular forums (they have distinct features). If you are trying to change politics with software, perhaps a good way to approach the problem is to try solving something specific, then build the community and write the code to do precisely that. One example is gathering support for specific campaigns. I live in Bulgaria, we have active protest movement against the current government, and a lot of the coordination and debate happens on Facebook. I had a specific campaign in mind that didn't happen for legal reasons, but it would have been very interesting otherwise. Send me a mail if you want to know more.
I think it's a mistake to think about real and virtual world as separate things. We live in a single world, and the online part grows more important with time. There are bits that are quite independent from the offline part, like interacting on HN with pseudonyms. Other bits, like Facebook, are typically much closer and interconnected with our offline life. Some mobile apps are even more integrated with the real world, although they are not very social.
Almost regardless of how impact is quantified, the answer is going to be yes.
Looking at any influential forum within any given vertical, that same pattern is repeated over and over.
Impact is material and real, when enough people with a shared interest come together.
Could the impact have been more measurable if the technology that powers forums been more supportive of the users needs? Again it's hard to answer that software that more easily helps pull people together in the real (as well as in the virtual) world and strengthen those bonds within a community wouldn't have more impact than software that didn't.
Forums are impactful, and do bring about advances. But currently only in small groups and without the impact or advances being accessible to other groups. The question isn't whether this happens in forums, but whether it's possible to encourage it to happen and what may emerge if it happens more often in similar ways. Could forums be used as a testing ground for new political structures within large groups of people, could they be used to evolve and prove those structures, and could the mechanisms of self-organisation within a forum be mapped back onto the real world.
It's not as crazy a thought as you might imagine, the seed is there and the tools do not support the way people are already trying to work. The tools today hold people back from what they naturally try to do, but if the tools supported people better things could be different.