Kudos for this interesting experiment, and the interesting theory behind it.

A thing I think about a lot wrt online communities is how to encourage "good-ness" where "good" is a tricky term to define. Maybe it's easier to say what it's not: what gets produced by the classic advertising model, where the site is hell-bent on increasing time-on-site, driving "engagement" (for a certain type of engagement), click-throughs, etc.

I think we all have a gut feel for how shitty and poisonous this is. What it feels like. So what are other ways a site can feel, what are other objective functions one could aspire to that affirm something valuable, that add something good to the world? How might one design for that, what interactions might encourage it?

There's some aspects of your "pseudo-family" idea in there, I think.