An OnlineVillage is an online Cheers bar - where everyone knows everyone's name, and the community manages its internal problems with SoftSecurity and consensus.

If we assume a village is bounded in practical size by DunbarsNumber, 150, because of the breakdown of the human ability to manage social problems through social techniques, the question becomes: what is a good bound for an OnlineVillage? While the naive answer might be, 150 - as supported by military rule-of-thumb - the key issue is that an OnlineVillage consists of people with MeatSpace, or at least disjoint online, community links. Military and real-world analogies cannot hold.

ChristopherAllen suggests in [Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation] that "group satisfaction" is gone by the time a group hits 16 people. He backs this up with some interesting game theory suggesting that groups of this size cannot cooperate successfully without some form of negative feedback system. Since online communities are relatively cheap to join and leave, people getting negative feedback are much more likely to leave than learn.

Whether the numbers are exact or not, there is still a low number of participants that can be involved in an OnlineVillage before the dynamics break down. Any technology that attempts to tackle the problem would seem to do so at the cost of breaking apart the village.