On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 1:05 PM, Charles Walker <charles.w.wal...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'd love to hear players' views on what causes these eras (if you don't think > they are just arbitrary labels), or rather what makes a particular system > stable enough to make it last that long. Does Agora simply create new things > that interest it and repeal things that bore it, or is there something deeper > there?
There is more variation than those eras suggest. Two suberas of the "massive contract system" era were sustained, as I remember it, almost singlehandedly by BobTHJ and his steam-powered gamestate tracking machine - not that we wouldn't have done some of the same things without em, but the massive spurt of activity at the time was promoted by eir willingness to track many fast-moving quantities. Both times, I think things subsided around the same time as his deregistration, although correlation is not causation... Right now, I think we have a lot of activity compared to several months ago and some new rules despite not having many fundamental changes since then. Why? Maybe just natural cyclic patterns of interest: after a break, people are ready for more, and there is a positive feedback loop. But enough speculation, here's a pretty graph of proposal count per month (don't want to use the domain for these incidental purposes, but qoid.us is temporarily down): http://agoranomic.org/propgraph/pg.html
