Lessons in decentralised governance from Twitch Plays Pokemon

Tom Nash
Web3 Australia
Published in
9 min readApr 3, 2019

The Twitch Plays Pokémon Livestream

For 16.5 days in February of 2014, an anonymous Aussie allowed 80,000 people to play a single game of Pokémon at the same time. This particular burst of internet-era tomfoolery was predictably chaotic, yet a level of signal emerged from the noise and provides compelling, applicable lessons about the nature of mass participation.