André Staltz:

I used to believe there was mass collaboration on the internet. But I’ve realized that collaboration is extremely hard. It does not scale, especially not at internet scale. The examples we look up to are either not collaborative on the microscopic level, or are rare exceptions to the rule.

The examples he’s referring to are “Wikipedia, open source projects such as Linux, hacktivism, and crowdsourced science experiments such as Rosetta@home.”

This post is sobering, but André speaks from a lot of experience.