Nay - no paywalls. This server should survive because its a nice place, not because people pay money to have a day in its operation.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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The Agora
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Nay, I feel there has to be some better way to go about it than paywalling it. Maybe based on account age and contribution.
Nay...optional donate to vote. I will be donating, but not everyone who deserves a vote will necessarily be.
Nay, This essentially turns this instance into an oligarchy. I don't think other instances are going to appreciate this type of governance either.
Also, nothing stops trolls and bad actors from donating the bare minimum a thousand times to get a thousand voices. This would mean a high minimum investment should be required, which further hurts the common user.
I believe that a shitty/troll opinion has an artificial majority, the real users will catch on and act accordingly, however we still have to see an example of this.
I'm also certain that privacy people would rather not risk money transfers, cash or whatever (crypto is a whole other discussion).
In short, I think requiring payment, or proof of identity, or any other de-anonymizing measures would hurt discussion by excluding genuine users, even if it allows more trolls that would be ignored/dealt with by genuine users.
Nay
Fantastic idea, money being involved in democracy has always worked out to benefit the average person.
Fuck the poors, they should have no voice in our community. What, you can't afford the price of a cup-a-coffee? Begon.
First vote afterwards? This is now a paid instance. I don't even want to see those plebs.
True democracy. Only ~~land owners~~ paying members^tm^ can vote
aye
Your vote will count as an approval even if you were clearly sarcastic.
I'll pay you twelve dollars for the rights to your vote
As it stands, you could just create another account for $0 rather than paying for their vote. In fact, you could create a whole lot of them.
That's a good point. There are other solutions though that are less destructive. We could have timed verification, "karma" limits, lock it behind an application, only select participants, or only community mods which would lower the amount of false voters. Non of these are perfect, but neither is the donation gate.
To echo myself in another comment:
There are countless ways to trick that system and the trolls will be more dedicated than the average user. If someone really wants it a hundred bucks isn’t that hard to get, or to “find”. Especially if crypto is an option. If it’s 5 bucks to vote permanently, then that’s 5 bucks per vote, permanently. A person with more money and more accounts will have outsized power in this community.
[this] selects a specific type of person too. As a dev, I understand how rare it is for a person to move into a paying role on a site.
This minority of the instances population on an already small group will be those who most want power, not the most invested. That’s what 5 dollars gets you. Power. This is a poor idea.
I understand your concern, but I disagree with the direction you'd take it. Only allowing paid users to vote creates a power inbalance and makes the more power hungry much more powerful, without really stopping them from making more accounts. Sure, it costs them more, but there will be much less competition to overcome.
I want to be clear that I wasn't necessarily arguing for some type of paid option. Just that what we have now also isn't democracy.
Either would be a democracy, definitionally, though both are imperfect. I'd agree something needs to be done to fix the imperfections where possible
Nay
Also wtf
The best way to ensure that democracy doesn’t spiral into Haiti