Paul Jun destroyed a wedding. He brought together a gang of friends, waited for the right moment then charged into the ceremony and began smashing things up… and killing the guests. The wedding took place on World of Warcraft between two players who had met and matched up in real life, and Paul was engaging in what he called “troll-like behavior.”

Look around your neighborhood. You’ll probably find people a lot like yourself: similar income, similar education levels, similar outlook, similar views.  It’s what journalist Bill Bishop called The Big Sort, the tendency to choose to live among people similar to ourselves. It’s one of the factors that has led to America’s polarization. When we meet and make friends with people who are like us, we find it harder to see the world from a perspective different from our own.

Imagine that you’re on your way out of your therapist’s office. The elevator opens and the person waiting by the door gives you a double-look. You’ve never seen them before. You don’t know them. But they know your name, who you work for, what school you went to, the details of your recent break-up, your struggles with an eating disorder, and of course the fact that you’re seeing a therapist to get your life back in order.

It’s hard to believe now, but back in the early days of the Web, when Amazon was still a bookshop and Mark Zuckerberg just another geeky Harvard student, websites didn’t have comments sections.

Remember MySpace? It used to be the king of social media, the platform that other social media platforms wanted to be.

Chances to beat Zuckerberg at his own game don’t come around too often but owners of private social networks have a glorious opportunity right now.