In the early days of this site, it was common to flirt with the idea of running it more democratically. This was correctly deemed unfeasible during the Age of Struggle Sessions and the arbitrary dictatorship of the mods was cemented.
But maybe the problem wasn’t democracy itself, but trying to jump the gun by modeling the site democracy after bourgeois or proletarian democracies. What we need to do is go back to the roots, reform the site to be more like ancient Athenian democracy.
I suggest the first reform is to implement a system of Ostrakismos, where once in a while there is a thread where we can name other users, and if one or more of these comments gets above a certain threshold of upvotes, the named user with the most upvotes on the comment gets banned for a year.
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I suggest we model it after the late Roman republic when organized mob violence against your political opponents was commonplace
I’ll offer a diadem to each admin and if they put it on they’re tyrannical kings
What we should do is vote once a year for a representative to represent us, and then let them single handedly choose a council to make rules and decisions. That council then serves for life and can never be removed. It’s up to each yearly representative to determine if they want to add to the council though. They get to replace members of the council if those members leave too. The council can make any decisions they want about anything ever with zero oversight but it’s okay because every year we get to vote once on who chooses members of the council so if we don’t like what the council is doing we can just vote for a different leader and they can maybe add someone to the council. Or we can hope the bad people on the council quit or die.
Anyway I’m told this is the best system of democracy ever so it’s definitely what we should do here at The United Federations of Hexbears
once a year sounds like a hassle, what if we made it every six years?
It has to be more often than that because I just can’t hold my
in that long
But how can we make Hexbear more authoritarian?
We should pick admins and mods randomly from the users every six months, if you are picked you have to serve
advanced level online bullying: getting drafted
juryjannie duty
I think lemmy should implement built in polls so we can vooooooooote
on what? anything and everything, all day. nothing more democratic than that
should [slightly stale bit] posting continue?
and every time we overwhelmingly vote yes, stuck in a loop of getting tired of a joke but thinking voting against the logical choice is funny, which rejuvenates the lame bit. eventually it will just be garfield posting, 100% of the time in pure earnest
🍤 carcinisation 🦀 garfinisation
We’ll vote out the polls!
honestly I’d like to see temp bans employed more. I don’t know why it’s either perma or nothing.
Some users just need a time-out to think about what they’ve done
“ban everyone” - Divine
I say we have a lottery, one lucky user every month wins and the rest of beat them with stones as tribute to the Lathe
I don’t like people even joking about this.
Hahahaha guys what if we did a heckin revolution and took back the means of posting? Hahahaha posters create value so we should have a union hahahahahahahahshshsh mod elections when hahahah turn over the server details hahahahahahahahhahahahahahahah
Banned? Contact your local soviet to appeal
The solution is to let me decide everything since I have the most good and correct takes
Ban me daddy
the people who do the work get the say. posters don’t work – the people running the site do. letting random people vote on stuff is deeply counterproductive and would just lead to constant squabbles with wreckers. no thank you.
sounds like something someone who’s afraid of getting ostrakismosed would say
oh no an account. anyway,
posters don’t work
In seriousness, (at least) one person needs to hold the keys to the castle. This is just a consequence of how digital infrastructure operates…
On one hand, there are the digital keys - the SSH key to log into the server and assorted secrets for various services. These are needed to log in to the server and do maintainence - update the software, run database migrations, produce and safekeep backups, etc. This person has total control. This responsibility can be vested in more than one person, but then each of those people have total control, including the ability to remove access from other admins.
On the other hand, there are the physical keys. The website runs on a server somewhere. This server is in someone’s physical custody. Whether it is an ISP, a server colocation facility, or under the admin’s bed, that person also has total control.
We could vote for who has the keys, but all it takes to ruin us is one
to get in.On top of being highly vulnerable to infiltration, voting for who holds the keys has a real “the people want faster horses” vibe imo. Voting is useful when consensus building has failed or is infeasible due to scale. It’s a solution to a human problem. Meanwhile, centralization of the resources required to run a platform is a technical problem, albeit a really difficult one. Non-blockchain decentralization is still in its infancy (or maybe adolescence?). Lots of room for growth and exploration there.
I think when we see Democracy as the set of political methods by which we decentralize authority, the idea that we should maintain centralized authority and simply force it to change hands regularly is a solution that would only ever arise when simpler solutions were materially infeasible. Representative democracy was a decent compromise when the goal was to allow the new bourgeoisie to resolve internal disputes without a central authority during a time when our fastest means of communication was horses carrying bags of paper. On the flip side of that, fluid democracy would require a massive and unwieldy bureaucracy if it were attempted before modern computers were widely available. It’s all very materially based.
On the topic of decentralized platforms, is anyone here familiar with Veilid? Seems like the creators are sufficiently anti-blockchain that this may check a bunch of the boxes I’ve been looking for in decentralized frameworks.
