I have seen many a democratic initiative ruined by trolls, bot accounts, duplicate accounts, and assholes. The best way to ensure that democracy doesn’t spiral into Haiti is to allow only financial contributors of $5 or more to vote (once the boss man has his contributions system up and running). You want to help build this community? OK, then put your money where your mouth is. To be clear, it should still be one vote per person, whether you donate $5 or $500.
Fantastic idea, money being involved in democracy has always worked out to benefit the average person.
Fuck the poors, they should have no voice in our community. What, you can’t afford the price of a cup-a-coffee? Begon.
First vote afterwards? This is now a paid instance. I don’t even want to see those plebs.
True democracy. Only
land ownerspaying memberstm can voteaye
I would like to add a second level of financial support to allow downvotes, say $10, an invisible downvote for $20, and a special Gold Star vote that you can buy individually which is also worth ten upvotes. Of course, if we implement Gold Stars I would like a FullOfShit award as well and a SilentButDeadly award which isn’t shown but resets the counter to -1 any time the vote would otherwise go positive.
Let make kbin a place just like the real world - where money buys influence!
Your vote will count as an approval even if you were clearly sarcastic.
I’ll pay you twelve dollars for the rights to your vote
As it stands, you could just create another account for $0 rather than paying for their vote. In fact, you could create a whole lot of them.
That’s a good point. There are other solutions though that are less destructive. We could have timed verification, “karma” limits, lock it behind an application, only select participants, or only community mods which would lower the amount of false voters. Non of these are perfect, but neither is the donation gate.
To echo myself in another comment:
There are countless ways to trick that system and the trolls will be more dedicated than the average user. If someone really wants it a hundred bucks isn’t that hard to get, or to “find”. Especially if crypto is an option. If it’s 5 bucks to vote permanently, then that’s 5 bucks per vote, permanently. A person with more money and more accounts will have outsized power in this community.
[this] selects a specific type of person too. As a dev, I understand how rare it is for a person to move into a paying role on a site.
This minority of the instances population on an already small group will be those who most want power, not the most invested. That’s what 5 dollars gets you. Power. This is a poor idea.
I understand your concern, but I disagree with the direction you’d take it. Only allowing paid users to vote creates a power inbalance and makes the more power hungry much more powerful, without really stopping them from making more accounts. Sure, it costs them more, but there will be much less competition to overcome.
I want to be clear that I wasn’t necessarily arguing for some type of paid option. Just that what we have now also isn’t democracy.
Either would be a democracy, definitionally, though both are imperfect. I’d agree something needs to be done to fix the imperfections where possible
Idk man, $5 once, for voting rights for as long as you participate?
I get your point, but it’s a pretty quick filter for trolls. Few are tossing five bucks for the privilege of fucking shit up when they can do that other places for free.
I’m not casting my vote yet as there are other means of gauging someone as an actor deserving* of voting rights in an instance (account membership, length of membership, x period of not being a shithead/having mod actions performed, etc.) that haven’t been fleshed out here, but if that is too difficult or fraught to be effective I will support a small fee for voting rights (while fighting tooth and nail against making this a pay-only instance afterwards).
*‘Deserving’ may raise some hackles, but keep in mind this isn’t a country in a real sense. Instance migration is a trivial action. If you feel you’re disenfranchised in some way by whatever vetting for voting rights we land on, pick another instance or spin your own.
I’d disagree that this is a reasonable solution, or that this will stop trolls. There are countless ways to trick that system and the trolls will be more dedicated than the average user. If someone really wants it a hundred bucks isn’t that hard to get, or to “find”. Especially if crypto is an option. If it’s 5 bucks to vote permanently, then that’s 5 bucks per vote, permanently. A person with more money and more accounts will have outsized power in this community.
You are right, there are other ways to validate. Moderators checking up on the posting history of random voters at reasonable intervals is one I’d like to see, and volunteer to do. I’d see any other, email validation, request form, specific user validation, active time, etc. before I’d lock it behind a monetary incentive. That only locks out people who can’t afford democracy, or justify the purchase. It selects a specific type of person too. As a dev, I understand how rare it is for a person to move into a paying role on a site.
This minority of the instances population on an already small group will be those who most want power, not the most invested. That’s what 5 dollars gets you. Power. This is a poor idea.
Thank you for the respectful and meaningful responce. though I disagree I’m glad to have the conversation
Yeah! Give all the decision-making to the rich! That has always worked out well.
Nay.
I agree duplicate accounts can and will be an issue, but I believe that donor-only voting is not the answer.
Although, if someone gives me a substantial donation, I might be convinced otherwise… /s
Nay. You shouldn’t be able to buy your way to influencing policy.
If there really is a concern with bot accounts or duplicate accounts, then those should be tackled via different ways. Also, what is with the assumption that “assholes” both don’t have money and also shouldn’t be allowed to vote?
It’s an interesting idea.
If you’re going to have a place that is ran by votes, you need a method of ensuring that each person voting is a distinct person and not the 5th alt of a person trying to push a specific result. Donations create a trail between an account and a specific person.
On the other hand, I firmly believe that anonymity is an important factor in freedom of speech. The de-anonymization of the Internet has caused a lot of problems with social media.
I’d say Nay for now, but the idea of having a system to enforce ‘One Person, One Vote’ is a good one. But maybe money/real ID isn’t it.
With a robust voting population, having 5 alts is not sufficient to affect the outcome anyway.
True, 5 wouldn’t do anything, but I can write a Python script in a few minutes that would keep creating alts as fast as the server would allow for weeks. Hundreds of thousands of users. Then I can single-handedly affect the outcome of any poll.
It wouldn’t take too much more automation to have them generate realistic looking comments using AI so they appear to be active users. Actually, how can you tell that I’m a real person? Maybe I’m a bot that can produce realistic looking conversation. :P
Electronic voting is a difficult thing to do in a way that is secure and accurate. I do think the idea of having a say in how the server works is a great idea. But it’s one that is tricky to implement correctly.
I thought the captcha was supposed to make automatically created accounts much harder. Do you have a way past that?
From my experience with AI, so far, just checking that you understand the concept of now and how it relates to past and future dates would be a good test.
Yeah, the implementation won’t be easy or perfect, but we should still aim to make it better.
Captcha solving services exist. At worse you’re essentially paying low wage workers to solve captcha for you. There are some AI image processing that can solve some captcha but their accuracy can vary.
In the end it boils down to making the cost as high as possible for spammers and also reducing the benefit of having a spam account by rapidly detecting and removing them.
It’s a hard problem to solve even for companies with massive resources.
Nay
If we don’t care about everyone having a chance to vote, then let’s just pick 25 users that have been active in the last week, at random and pass things 14 of them support.
Nay. While I understand the driver behind the suggestion, I think a paywall is not the solution here.
@9999monkeys No… don’t create such things like Twitter and such does. Everyone is the “same level” and donating is optional since not everyone can affort it
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Nay - no paywalls. This server should survive because its a nice place, not because people pay money to have a day in its operation.
Nay…optional donate to vote. I will be donating, but not everyone who deserves a vote will necessarily be.
Nay, paywalled democracy isn’t democracy.
Nay
Also wtf
The best way to ensure that democracy doesn’t spiral into Haiti
Nay, I feel there has to be some better way to go about it than paywalling it. Maybe based on account age and contribution.
That would mean that many of the people which make up the community, but physically do not have the money to donate to these services (no matter how much you wanted to) would be completely left out of the equation on an important part of the community.
It would eventually lead to all the content on this instance or the threadiverse as a whole to be dominated by people richer than you which are able to afford this, which can then shift the content which they would like to see to the top of magazines.
Additionally, a sub-culture would likely form which would shame users for not being able to vote due to afford donating.
TL;DR:
Making votes donor-only poses a threat to the neutrality that comes by default on these platforms and incentivises hostile subcultures which would make the experience worse for a big part of this instance and potentially the threadiverse as a whole.
