"Consider what that cartoon means in that context: It implies that the commenter feels—with some irony and self-awareness, I'm sure—that his opinion, in some way, is relevant to the question of whether Clive Sinclair should marry a particular woman."

"If you tap into the human need to be consulted you can get some interesting reactions. Here are a few: Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Hunch, Reddit, MetaFilter, YouTube, Twitter, StumbleUpon, About, Quora, Ebay, Yelp, Flickr, IMDB, Amazon.com, Craigslist, GitHub, SourceForge, every messageboard or site with comments, 4Chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica. Plus the entire Open Source movement."

"“Why wasn't I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived."

"Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively."

"Brace yourself for the initial angry wave of criticism: How dare you, I hate it, it's ugly, you're stupid."

"The ultimate question lurks beneath these curses: why wasn't I consulted?"

"WWIC is the thing people talk about when they talk about nicer-sounding things like “the wisdom of crowds” or “cognitive surplus.”"

"The obvious example of WWIC at work is Wikipedia, created for free by unpaid labor. It tapped into the basic human need to be consulted and never looked back."

"Then there's YouTube. It was created so that anyone could upload and distribute videos. So that's one level of WWIC—to hell with TV, people should look at me!"

"The site has comments, so people can discuss the videos—a second level of WWIC."

"But there are now also thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons so that you can rank the comments and the video, a third level of WWIC."

"Once you see that third level, a website is complete. You're down to the bedrock."

"My favorite among the sites with favorites is MetaFilter, which asks its members to filter out, and write up, the best of the web, and then invites them to discuss what was filtered."

"The focus, above profit, was on moderating and managing the community. That worked very well. But while huge, the site remains a great read."

"Of course there's also MetaTalk, the gray, the part of MetaFilter that lets people talk about MetaFilter, so that people can feel consulted about being consulted. It's WWIC all the way down—but acknowledged, understood, and turned, through painstaking labor, to good."

"The rapidly expanding Internet community Reddit has its own approach to the WWIC problem—a simpler form for posts, less room for narrative and voting on stories and comments, which allows us to punish or reward, and derives from the aggregate punishments and rewards a view of the most popular or approved-of stories and comments."

"It even has something akin to Ask MetaFilter with its “IamA (Ask Me Anything)” section. (Question 2 at this writing—“I am a New York Times bestselling novelist. Ask me anything.”) But it's built to scale—to capture more and more links with more and more “subreddits.”"

"You need a back button, a database, and a community."

"So what kind of medium is the web if the boundaries are so unclear, and if the fundamental question is WWIC?"

"Create a service experience around what you publish and sell. Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it."

"Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you'll sell things."

"If you don't want to do that then just find niche communities who might conceivably care about your products and buy great ad placements. It's a better online spend."

"Don't blame people for looking bad in systems that aren't well-designed to make them look good. Self-importance doesn't come from people wanting to talk. It comes from systems that aren't good at fitting people comfortably in."

"That the new thing might make, instead of lose, money is a morale booster. So media properties are migrating into these apps, where boundaries between reader and publisher can be defined and enforced."