In the spirit of the Ancient Greek Agora, we invite you to join our vibrant community - a contemporary meeting place for the exchange of ideas, inspired by the practices of old. Just as the Agora served as the heart of public life in Ancient Athens, our platform is designed to be the epicenter of meaningful discussion and thought-provoking dialogue.
Here, you are encouraged to speak your mind, share your insights, and engage in stimulating discussions. This is your opportunity to shape and influence our collective journey, just like the free citizens of Athens who gathered at the Agora to make significant decisions that impacted their society.
You're not alone in your quest for knowledge and understanding. In this community, you'll find support from like-minded individuals who, like you, are eager to explore new perspectives, challenge their preconceptions, and grow intellectually.
Remember, every voice matters and your contribution can make a difference. We believe that through open dialogue, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to discovery, we can foster a community that embodies the democratic spirit of the Agora in our modern world.
Community guidelines
New posts should begin with one of the following:
Only moderators may create a [Vote] post.
Based on your username and post history it's pretty clear why you're against the democratic process.
This is not a safe space for people that believe the way you do. This will never be a haven for hateful ignorance like yours.
Try Parler, or or one of the other right wing echo chambers.
Stop trying to turn this website into your own personal hateful circlrjerk, it's not gonna happen.
This place is not for you.
Sure, there's a baby inside, but OP really doesn't want all of this bathwater.
Community guided direction is a good idea that can be improved on as needed.
Heh, clever.
We have a "counsel of trusted users", it's the mod team who are committed to making our little democracy thrive. We don't want to be in control, we want to facilitate the community in choosing its own direction.
The simplicity of our process works in our favor. If somebody spun up 1000 alts to mess with a vote, we would notice. All of the discussions and votes happen publicly, so anyone can audit the profiles involved if things seem weird. I'll play whack-a-mole with bots every day if I need to, and that can also be audited on the publicly-visible modlog.
No system is perfect. This is the system we decided to try, despite the challenges that could arise from it.
Nooooo votes bad dictatorship good
While I like the idea of the agora, and have seen genuine debate on the issues presented there. I can't help but also agree with this. It's hard for multi-billion dollar companies to keep bots from ruining their services, and comparatively lemmy has little defense. I don't know if I like the idea of blocking it off for only a few moderators to make the decisions either, but at the same time I can't think of a better alternative.
I'm not really sure what the best solution is but open voting is obviously not going to work with open federation and users not being validated as real humans. If someone wants me to write a bot and prove what i'm saying I can totally do it. In fact I probably will if votes are used in the future just to prove how easily it is to manipulate things.
This is a valid concern. Our procedure for voting requires that a user comment Aye/Nay. Therefore, anyone is free to view the user profile to assess whether they might be a bot.
We will continue to assess whether we can better protect the decision making process from bots, but due to the small size of this forum, it would seem fairly tricky to influence the vote just yet.
Rest assured that we won't be fooled by one guy in his basement running 1,000 alts.
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.
No. We will not be accepting 10,000 votes from Lulzsec.troll in our Agora threads. This is an easy problem to solve.
I think OP raises a valid concern. In the near term, I don't know what will be voted on that will be worth the effort of spinning up a bot army. But it could happen eventually. Large floods of votes might be easier to detect. Smaller bot armies could be harder, but still impactful to the outcome.
Perhaps we could fire up some kind of identity service. A user goes there, puts in their username, solves a CAPTCHA, and gets back a url to a page that contains their username. The pages can be specific to a particular vote so urls aren't reusable. Every time a user votes, they need to solve a new CAPTCHA. User will include their identity url when voting.
Admins can confirm that user names and identity urls match.
Could be more efficient ways to do it, this was my first thought.
Bad actors gonna act. How do we determine a council of trusted users? The idea of the agora is to avoid power in the hands of the few because those few might be or become the problem.
I'm not saying your argument is wrong but if someone wants to manipulate a community bad enough, they will find a way.
When the community it big enough to worry about voter manipulation then there will be resources to counter it.
Yeah OP is just another bad actor here, trying to turn lemmy into another crazy pit.
This topic came up in a couple of posts here before, with different proposed solutions like
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
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?
Nay.
Hey TGB! Just so you know, this isn't a voting thread. We currently divide posts here between [Discussion] and [Vote], and this one is just about discussing OP's take/proposal (which I guess is suspending the Agora system entirely).
I see you've been here for a little over a week now - I'm curious what your thoughts are about what OP's saying based on what you've seen so far?
Huh, a conservative trying to downplay voting in favor of an oligarchy. Well I never.
You're not wrong that the integrity of online voting is hard to protect - like, REALLY hard. However:
a) Our last vote on whether voting rights should be extended to members of other instances landed on it being sh.it.heads only. If it comes to a revote (or if the current vote thread is actually still live, it's not super clear to me how the pre-mod voting threads are being dealt with), that might change, but if it holds this at least cuts out the bot instance vector.
b) While you might be right about bots being in this instance (I have no hard facts to support replacing that 'might be' with 'are'), the community has bandied about different means of evaluating what other factors should matter for counting a user's vote. There is a LOT of disagreement on this at the moment, but whatever is finally landed on should be designed with bots and bad actors in mind (stuff like age of account, participation metrics [could extend to patterns that suggest human activity* v. bot activity, where/if possible], linked e-mail or donation, manual user evaluation, etc. etc.). I don't know if whatever's landed on will be successful, or if anything tried will be useless in practice, but I say shit, why not try? Hell, it's a long shot, but in the experiment we could land on something that works and could be ported to other instances - who knows?
While SysOp (and Council) as Benevolent Dictator - where there is no vote, but there is a suggestion box, and it is looked at and discussed by a small number of people who aren't ass-clowns - is the tried-and-tested method for online community governance, I say why not at least entertain the experiment? The absolute worst case scenario that happens is that it goes to shit, TheDude says fuck it and closes shop, and users migrate** to other instances. Sucks, but it's not life-threatening.
*I don't know about y'all, but for instance I edited this thing like 7 times over 30 minutes. I do this on pretty much all of my posts longer than 4 sentences. Is this routine practice of a bot or human? Is this information stored somewhere to evaluate my meatiness?
**There's a lot of hand-wringing about instance migration, as right now it pretty much means "Make a new account elsewhere and start from scratch". Doesn't matter all that much to me, but I'm also not the sentimental type - shit, my history here is some of the longest I've kept without pruning in a while. But as portability of accounts increases (which is a challenging, but insistent feature being asked for across many instances), this may turn into a complete nothingburger in general.
I'm not entirely opposed. But gaining membership in this trusted subset of users should be a fairly open process somehow. Like, have a community where people can post an intro about themselves, have conversations about themselves with others, and, if most superusers who bother to vote deem them human enough, they are inducted into the club.
The only way a council of trusted users could work (and still maintain democratic legitimacy)is if it's chosen by something like sortition for each issue individually. This would be from a larger pool of active and at least verified non-bot users.
Even with that, the tools to set this up don't exist, and it would require far more community participation than is likely to actually happen. Without going through a process like sortition you end up with a council of clerics effectively ruling by decree.
Then we lose basically all voting power and it's just people who don't represent the community voting on behalf of us. There should be some limit on the voting like old users with posts and comments that consistently post and engage with the community. I don't think there are that many botted accounts on this instance yet.
I think rather than voting we have discussions. It's a bit more complicated than writing an up voting script and will hopefully get points across that a mere yes/no would never.