Please god no, this agora shit has enough HOA vibes as it is without a bunch of busybodies making their crusade everybodies problem. I’m in favor of defederating and I’m still sick of seeing it on my feed.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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The Agora
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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.
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The current policy is, a [Discussion] thread runs for a week, then a [Vote] thread runs for a week. How is that not enough time?
It's a good amount of time in my view, but I also think that without some active means of "pushing" the vote to people who aren't actively checking The Agora and who might not stumble across it in their subscriptions or local feed, we risk many people not having a chance to give their input.
Look if we are really going to do the direct democracy thing this problem will always exist. More engaged users will rule the forum, and less engaged users will feel marginalized and make excuses or demand concessions when votes don't go their way. The only way around this is to enforce some kind of quorum threshold but that will almost certainly never work. Pinned announcements will just flood the forum unless you restrict the number of possible votes per week, which might be an interesting thing to try.
I personally kind of think it's a bad idea (this brand of forum democracy), but I'm also curious to see the experiment play out.
I think having an announcement of the [Vote] results along with an invitation for people to check out the Agora would be useful. That way users will enter at the start of the cycle and can have time to read and participate with the discussion during the week.
Great idea
I think that would be overkill. The current Vote thread has 327 upvotes and 419 comments, so it's definitely being seen.
Also, having people come in and vote who didn't take part in the discussion can be problematic as they'll have a pretty shallow understanding of the topic and the arguments for and against.
This seems like a rash generalization. I'm sure there's plenty of people who can understand the concept without reading everyone else's opinion on it.
Besides, we shouldn't try to limit voting on topics that affect everybody to just the people that spend their days arguing on here. This has a server wide impact and should be announced server wide.
I was able to find this sub, read the announcements and discussion, and vote. I came here because I was curious about the self-governance experiment. Are you interested in increasing voting, or engagement with governance.? They're related but not the same.
Separately, I think we should rename the process "defenestration."
Separately, I think we should rename the process "defenestration."
Seconded. Any objection in the assembly?
Objection: defederation is a beautifully descriptive name. You remove an instance from the Federation. Defenestration is funny, but doesn't give any context.
We're tossing whole instances out the window.
Have we considered defratinization?
I won't downvote because I think that it's rude to do so when disagreeing, however I think you may be overestimating how much people want access to the entire fediverse. Especially parts of it that are overtly hateful. This post is melodramatic.
This seems like a lot of drama over having to just log into your account on that instance instead of seeing it in your All feed.
It seems like a lot of drama over telling Nazis to get fucked.
Are they really Nazis? Are they denying the Holocaust? Calling for genocide? I see a lot of run of the mill right-wing conspiracy crap. If they aren't causing problems here there's little justification for banning them wholesale.
It mirrors my opinion on the matter of "democratic rulemaking" through forums like /c/TheAgora
Please see my response, I wrote one just now.
I am of the very strong opinion that both sides in this drama are comical.
The internet has zero chill.
"from another instance". Name the instance. It's exploding-heads. It's not "another instance" it's a vile instance full of trash and hate.
They're probably speaking broadly since this won't be the last time we vote.
According to this earlier announcement, voting will run for a week. I don't see a need to push notifications out. Just check weekly for votes. A discussion will precede a vote, so interested users will have had time to know the vote was coming/happening.
I'm not certain all that is necessary but I agree there should be no more than one active vote at a time and it should be pinned to the top. It's quite easy to miss what's going on if you don't happen to log in every day.
Limiting the number of votes kind of has the same vulnerability though. Bad actors can flood the queue with dumb shit to push important votes to delay or create vote fatigue.
Personally, I kind of think there's a reason why direct democracy isn't used for this kind of stuff. If we really want a democratic forum we should have representatives, checks and balances, quorums, etc.
Bad actors can flood the queue with dumb shit to push important votes to delay or create vote fatigue.
This is why only mods can create [Vote] posts.
Personally, I kind of think there’s a reason why direct democracy isn’t used for this kind of stuff. If we really want a democratic forum we should have representatives,
Looking at the current state of the real world and real representative systems, i'm quite excited to see where this small direct democracy thing here is going.
--> Hey it works for the swiss, maybee it can work for us too. ;)
People are going to get a lesson on why democracy can be a messy business.
It's a fun thought experiment carrying the idea through. How would we district?
Lower house - comprised of randomly assigned "districts" of active users with a fixed size which reshuffle every so often. The purpose here is largely to create a class of "professional" administrative citizens who are required to register a vote for their district. Not voting would result in an immediate reelection in the district.
Middle house - every local community over some size, or gated by other criteria gets two representatives, plus bonus reps for size/activity/whatever up to some maximum.
Upper house - forum-wide vote by ranked choice. Admin gets some nominating spots, and the other legislative bodies do as well.
What are we, a community or a government simulator?
😁 ¿por qué no los dos?
Three houses! Interesting. Ok, now I want there to be a civics community to argue this out, lol.
Edit: Also, this instance is billed as bilingual... have we told the francophones about any of this? Je suis un croissant and all that.
In this case the upper house effectively acts as an executive proxy or "small council" since the admin is functionally a monarch, and always will be.
Couldn't we just point out that when it happens and just remove the bad faith votes? Direct democracy often encounters issues because the community isn't united in the goal of consensus-based decision making. Ideally, we should encourage this instance to shift towards consensus-making instead of simple y/n votes that might still result in large amounts of users feeling ignored or unwelcome.
The conversation should take place with the goal in mind being to reach decisions for the community that most people can abide by - this is why I've been supportive of making voting exclusive to accounts on this instance.
from the "Changes to the Agora" post.
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