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Why voting should not be used here at all

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/465141

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.

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  • A council of trusted people. I've seen that somewhere else before. How were these people called..... Ah yes: Sowiet.

    • I don't think we should get to hung up my my proposed solution. If you don't like it it's fine to address my concerns with a better solution.

      • You see a problem where there is none: Don't like voting, find an anarchist lemmy instance. Don't like this either? Open your own. That's the beauty of the Fediverse, you're not prisoner of a centralised platform, the same service, the same information can get to you via any other instance.

        • So one user having 50 votes and one user having 1 vote is voting?

          • Voting is voting. Nobody was talking about fair, equal etc votes.

            Right now the way votes are cast it imperfect and can be exploited by using sockpuppet accounts, but this can change at any time and switch to a polling service. Is that better? Well maybe, electronic voting is hard.

            But as I said: Your issue is a non-issue, the inherent nature of the Fediverse makes it irrelevant, just switch instance, self-host... There's no exclusivity here. You're not the customer or the product here, you're a contributor and you can contribute from anywhere.

            • Voting is voting. Nobody was talking about fair, equal etc votes.

              Feels kinda pointless if votes are not fair or equal. Then it just becomes a battle of who has the most free time.

              • You might not want to look into most voting mechanisms used in representative democracies...

                • like apartheid? This is apartheid

                  • Quite hyperbolic. Sorry but I don't see a point for further engagement, I don't see me your you benefitting from continuing this exchange. You don't want to engage nor reason, you like to deflect. Which is a fine strategy to look smart, but it doesn't further the discussion.

                    On a personal note; Find an instance that doesn't give you grievances.

27 comments