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.
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.
The exact solution is difficult. That’s why no one has done it, but the proposed method is clearly flawed with many ways to game it by a few bad actors.
Sure, but your solution is to abandon democracy entirely and rely on someone to rule over you. I’d rather the effort be put into making democracy work.
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Great. How?
I already said sortition is a possibile solution that could eventually be implemented. I’m sure the community can come up with others as different problems arise.
sortition, solecting a sample of votes? How is selection a sample from a pool of 500 votes where 200 are fake a possible solution though?
The pool of potential voters would need some level of verification for activity and status as a real person, so no fresh accounts or easy botting. It also increases the level of effort required to manipulate a vote, there’s no guarantee for a hostile actor to actually get randomly selected enough to affect whatever votes they want.
I don’t think it’s foolproof, but I’m sure there are workable solutions to any issues.
Closest to a workable solution i’ve seen yet. The problem I have with these sort of tactics is this is basically how shadow banning became a thing. The war against bots made it so you never eve knew if your comments where being seen.