A DAO (or a Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is an online community with decentralized rule enforcement.

Take any online community — a forum, an MMORPG, or your friend group chat. Make sure that no one person can tamper with the rules without community agreement. And you have a DAO.

For subreddits, rule enforcement is not decentralized because a single mod could wield all the power. That mod could:

• admit anyone

• kick anyone out

• promote anyone to a moderator

• ban users with no recourse

• censor posts

The users give the website most of its value. Yet the users are excluded from ownership or any say in the platform that they make possible.

DAO’s automate out these centralized powers through code called smart contracts. So imagine instead of a power-hungry mod, we replaced them with a tamper-proof bot that automatically enforced these rules.

The rules would be transparent to all, as anyone could see how the code was written. And the bot would moderate the community using these agreed upon rules. More on this later.

And if people disagree, there is always recourse — put the issue to a vote. If enough people agree, the bot’s rules would change, and a user could get unbanned, or an unfair law reversed.