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In this paper, we consider chance-curation (the task of eas-ing chance-discovery activities for agents) as far as it concernsinformation sharing in online communities, understood as Vir-tual Cognitive Niches. We claim that Virtual Cognitive Nichesare digitally-encoded collaborative distributions of informa-tion and pieces of knowledge into the environment. The par-ticularity of Virtual Cognitive Niches, as socially biased net-works, is that they provide more ways for agents to interactthan to control the quality of the information they share and re-ceive. We contend that this social bias enables chance-curationstrategies that agents cannot foster in real-life communities. Inparticular, the chance curation strategies that we discuss are:redirecting the attention of agents to the virtual domain, foster-ing an only-docility-based relation with truth, and increasingthe social virtues of fallacies.

The human part of chance-discovery is usually analyzed as aneffect of the agent’s knowledge of herself and of her environment.In this paper, setting off from the importance of “understandingthe meaning of an impending phenomenon as achance,” we will analyze how chance-discovery activities areaffected and driven by the agent’s ignorance, and the relationshipshe entertains with the latter. More specifically, we willspell out two kinds of ignorance that are relevant for chancediscovery,also considering which abductive chance-discoveryprocesses they can be related to.