Everyone I have something very important to say about The Agora.

The Problem

Let me be super clear here to something people don’t seem to understand about lemmy and the fediverse. Votes mean absolutely nothing. No less than nothing.

In the fediverse, anyone can open a instance, create as many users as they want and one person can easily vote 10,000 times. I’m serious. This is not hard to do.

Voting at best is a guide to what is entertaining.

As soon as you allow a incentive the vast majority of votes will be fake. They might already be mostly fake.

If you try to make any decision using votes as a guide someone WILL manipulate votes to control YOU.

one solution (think of others too!)

A counsel of trusted users.

The admin, top mods may set up a group to decide on who to ban and what instances to defederate from. You will not get it right 100% of the time but you also won’t be controlled by one guy in his basement, running 4 instances and 1,000 alts.

Now i’m gonna go back to shit posting.

  • BaldDude@sh.itjust.works
    111·
    1 year ago

    This topic came up in a couple of posts here before, with different proposed solutions like

    • “only local users should have a vote”
    • “only trusted users should have a vote”
    • “only paying users should have a right to vote”

    I too see the potential for fake votes becoming a problem, but at the moment i don’t like the solutions.

    at some point we probably will have to vote on it. ;)

    Edit: typo and formating

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      1 year ago

      I still hold that “who should get to vote” should depend on what the vote is for; I could see some policies being restricted to donating members when the policy in question involves how actual money should be spent, where votes to add/subtract moderators or amend the instance’s policies would be open to all members of the instance.

      Given the recently announced policy of votes first being announced a week ahead of time to allow for discussion, I think an effective way to prevent an influx of brigade accounts would be to limit votes to members whose cake days are before the topic was announced. Should cut down on the “signed up a few hundred times to vote” issue.

      I’m also going to ask: What votes are we going to hold here in the shitjustworks agora that will attract that much attention? Electing mods of !main and !agora?