The Agora

To prevent fracturing of our instance and retaliation against users for votes you don't agree with.

Well, title says it clear. We might need some condition to prevent trolls from creating a lot of accounts and taking over whole instance. I'd like to discuss ideas for this. Like, amount of days on instance could work, but I'm not sure if it would work out very well. Anyway, please share your opinions on this whole subject.

EDIT: There's a lot of opinions, but, at least for me, looks like whatever system we'll come up with, it will either be based on time from account creation or on activity(or maybe both). Correct me if i wrong.

I have seen many a democratic initiative ruined by trolls, bot accounts, duplicate accounts, and assholes. The best way to ensure that democracy doesn't spiral into Haiti is to allow only financial contributors of $5 or more to vote (once the boss man has his contributions system up and running). You want to help build this community? OK, then put your money where your mouth is. To be clear, it should still be one vote per person, whether you donate $5 or $500.

Registrations should require a valid email address and temporary/disposable (e.g. temp-mail.org ) email services should be rejected.

Note this should not be implemented as a whitelist; "obscure" email services such as Protonmail, Tutanota and personal email servers should be allowed.

Pros:

• Cuts down on the number of trolls attempting to register, reducing load on mods and admins.
• Improves our standing with other instances.
• Ensures users have the ability to reset their password.

Cons:

• Has privacy concerns - people may not want to associate their email address with everything.
• Users may not (and perhaps should not have to) trust the admins of this instance with their email.
• May not be supported well by Lemmy, and/or require a blacklist that needs updating.

Aye and nay in the comments, please.

What kind of threshold should a vote have to pass before being implemented? Do we really want to be making changes based on a vote that only got one "Aye"? Ten Ayes? Over 50% of the user base?

What kind of vote engagement can we reasonably expect to achieve? Is it actually likely that 50% of the user base will engage with any particular vote? Are there any useful presidents out there?

Who should be responsible for counting the votes when they're over? Perhaps the OP tallies the votes and edits the post?

Is there an easy test the mods can apply to a tallied vote to allow them to check whether it's passed? Something that is not open to interpretation and results in a clear directive to make a change?

I'm also kind of testing out this discussion format as a way of generating things to vote on i.e DISCUSSION > POLL > VOTE seems to make sense.

We'll see :)

Currently there is no rule for when a vote is over, or when the vote is tallied. I propose we allow 24 hours from post creation to allow everyone in the community to have a chance to see and consider a proposal and vote. After 24 hours from post creation, the 'polls' would close and the votes can be tallied. Any votes cast after 24 hours would be invalid.

Edit: some good points made, I withdraw this proposal

My primary argument is that they post hateful content and covid conspiracies and it is irresponsible to platform this by including it in our federation. Secondly we already got rid of lemmygrad. Thirdly, there's little to be lost in the defederation given the type of stuff being posted over there. Do as thou wilt

Aye and nays pls

Edit: putting the screencaps I posted below here for clarity

I should probably put a content warning so

CW: homophobia, transphobia, and just being a shithead.

Edit 2: let's try not to downvote people just saying nay. Unless they are making bad faith arguments we should respect their opinions even if we disagree.

Edit 3: Imma be real with y'all, this has been a real shitshow. We gotta work out some kinda single voting infrastructure because the ayes and Nays isn't efficient at all.

My understanding is that it’s not currently possibly to flair posts on Lemmy. However, I want to suggest that we establish some basic etiquette/format for posts, such as beginning a title with [Vote], [Discussion], [Poll], [Question], or something similar. I believe that this could help clarify content. This etiquette could be outlined in the sidebar.

In favour, reply: “Aye”

Against, reply: “Nay”

ETA: This would apply only to the Agora, not across the entire instance. Additionally, these would be superseded by flairs if and when that becomes a possibility.

Those in favor reply "Aye"

Those against reply "Nay"