3 ms·
Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.
by guerrilla 7mo ago
Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.
- Gud 7mo agoWhy? Genuinely curious. I am a big proponent of (direct) democracy in general.
- mavhc 7mo agoInternet is way behind on democracy. In general everyone likes democracy until they're in charge, then they realise they're the best person to be in charge and the idiots who vote don't have a clue, and should probably be banned if not beheaded for speaking out of turn. You'd have to weight votes by some kind of participation metric to solve the problem of very little authentication of the voters
- johannes1234321 7mo agoAs long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator. In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator. Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.
- gzread 7mo agoNecessary for this is that subforums can't have unique names. If a bad mod can squat all the words like "computers", "programming", "coding", newcomers aren't going to know the best subforum is called "RealProgNoBadMod"
- johannes1234321 7mo agoYes, the "important" ones need some special attention. If "democracy" where anybody can create arbitrary amount of accounts is however questionable. The vast majority of sub forums however are more targeted and smaller to begin with.
- leoedin 7mo agoYou see this in city-focused subreddits. But the reality is the name is power. New users type in their city and join the original one. The hostile mods suppress mention of the new one. It never manages to get critical mass.
- dijit 7mo agosadly, a nice idea that is painfully naive with how computers are used in reality. One need only remember how easy it was to take over IRC channels with a few hundred bots to see the endgame of this rationale… it cannot be patched out, it’s inherent to the internet. That which would make a vote valid; can (and will) be gamed.
- leptons 7mo agoIt could work depending on how it is set up. Maybe only accounts with n-number of years get 1 single vote, and maybe don't let any random 2-day old account get a vote.
- pixl97 7mo agoSo now accounts are worth even more money or reason to steal.
- rafaeltorres 7mo agoor sell
- 9rx 7mo ago> it’s inherent to the internet. Who said the election needs to take place on the internet? A paper ballot-style election, while not perfect either, works well enough in practice.
- guerrilla 7mo agoObviously you'd have to acquire a reputation of menbership to be eligible to vote. See StackOverflow.
- twic 7mo agoStack Overflow does this and it works far better than arbitrary tyrant style moderation.
- gzread 7mo agoStack Overflow is dead now.
- PaulHoule 7mo agoI don’t think it was ever very good.
- gzread 7mo agoProbably, but now it's actually dead by all the metrics. People ask LLMs instead because they won't close their questions.
- freedomben 7mo agoIt was pretty decent in the mid and late 00s. The community started turning toxic in the very early 10s and by about 2015 was quite poisonous. The saddest part is that the problem was known and spoken about frequently, but the response to that from staff and/or high-level mods was to just double down and dig in.
- 9rx 7mo agoI'm too old, but it seemed like it would be decent for a beginner in the mid-to-late 00s. But it never handled advanced, difficult topics very well.
- freedomben 7mo agoFor sure, advanced difficult topics were never really their forte', although it was really common to get great book or blog recommendations via comments. For me, the golden combination was a good book on the language/framework/topic I was stuyding, supplemented with specific Q&A from Stack Overflow. I have extremely fond memories learning C++ and Qt that way (although that Qt book was a little rough, but at least there was a Qt book. Nowadays every book just seems too outdated to be helpful).
- 9rx 7mo agoA democratic election requires that the elected be your employee, where you work with him on a regular basis to direct him in his job. That works (ish) in government where people doing the hiring have heavily invested life interests in it succeeding. Does a subforum offer the same? Once the mod is elected, are you going to sit down with him each day to make sure he is doing the job to your wishes and expectations? I say (ish) in government because it often doesn't even work there, even where people have heavily invested life interests, with a lot (maybe even the vast majority!) of people never getting involved in democracy. A subforum? Who cares? If there were to be elections, it is unlikely they could be anything other than authoritarianly, with the chosen one becoming the ultimate power.