Comment on What principles you wish to see social networks (or the fediverse) adopt in their design?
Pamasich@kbin.earth 2 weeks agoI do think that some direct democracy would be good, but there's a reason why Switzerland still has representatives too.
Having to vote on every single moderation action would be a pain to deal with. Not just in terms of fatigueing users and causing only few to actually participate, but also because it'll slow down the process and empower bad actors to cause more damage.
What should be a thing imo is what Switzerland has: the ability for regular users to propose new rules and then vote on approving them, and the ability to undo any moderation action through a democratic vote. Both of those being binding.
Also of course the ability to vote a mod out if they're abusing their power. That's something we're lacking IRL too.
Edit: On your other point:
It gets a bit tricky with technology. Ideally we could do things like democratically decide to have a voice chat (if that's what people want) and somehow 3 months later the platform has a voice chat... But it's not that easy, software development doesn't work this way.
I think one thing that's possible is to copy the GOG model. Have a wishlist of features that people can add to and vote on. The highest voted features you prioritize in development.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 weeks ago
Yes, surely. I mean we’re a bit in a different situation in a digital place. Votes are way easier here (than in real life) and we can easily automate it into bigger processes.
For example I could envision something like a jury to make judiciary decisions. Not sure if that counts as direct democracy… But we don’t have to ask everyone about every moderation decision. Maybe just grant everyone the ability to report stuff and then the software goes ahead and samples 15 random people from the community (who arent part of the drama) and makes them decide. I believe that could help with fatigue. And speeds it up, we can just set the software to take people who are online right now, and discard and replace them if they don’t get at it asap.
Or make it not entirely direct, but at least do away with the hierarchies in a representative democracy. Instead of appointing moderators, we’d form a web of trust. I’m completely free to delegate power to arbitrary people and if 3 people in my web of trust say it’s spam, it is spam for me. And someone else could have a different perspective on the network. That’d help with all the coordination as well, because I can just not care, and the platform automatically delegates the power. And once I do care, I’m free to vote and that spares other people the effort to do the same.
Of course democracy is a trade-off. And there’s a million edge cases, and we need some other things which go along with it. Accountability and transparency. We’d need an appeal process, for example with my first example if the jury doesn’t do a good job.
I’m probably not at a 100% perfect solution with these ideas. But I’m fairly sure we’d be able to do way more in a software-driven platform than the analogies we can take from countries and their approach at decision making. Especially regarding hierarchies within the system.
2) PieFed did a public poll to form a roadmap for 2025. I think it turned out very well. PeerTube also does that. The open-source tool that looks like GOG’s website is called Fider
I love it as well. Though, from a software developers perspective, it rarely goes all the way. There’s just so many technical decisions to be made, limitations, vague requirements, contradictions. Sometimes users think they want something but they really need the opposite of it… And they always want wildly different things and more often than not it’s not healthy for the projects to approach it that way. They’d instead do it in order as mandated by the technical design, have more pressing issues and all of that is buried beneath layers of technical complexity. So the users hardly know what’s appropriate to do. I believe that’s why we often gravitate to the “benevolent dictator” model in Free Software. Or why some regular (paid) software projects fail or exceed budged and time planning. It should be that way, though. If software is meant for users, the developers should probably listen to them, so I love what these projects do, to at least augment their development process with some participation and guidance by the target audience. And some people are really good at it.