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Agreed. The reason why democracy works is because of the illusion of power - The people at the top give you the illusion of freedom - The freedom of speech, to
by neya 14y ago
Agreed.
The reason why democracy works is because of the illusion of power - The people at the top give you the illusion of freedom - The freedom of speech, to do what you want, etc. while you have nothing of those in reality.
Ideally, you had all those right from the early man days, then someone at the top curbed you of these and gave it back to you so you would feel 'powerful'. While we all are slaves in one way or the other - We all pay taxes most of which is pocketed by the politicians (in most corrupt countries) and we read the media everyday without knowing that they sell us like a bag of chips to their advertisers and we all think we can say whatever we want on Facebook/Twitter/etc. while all of it is being actually monitored by unknown agencies, etc.
Likewise, Stackoverflow has these so called 'moderators' who somehow magically are considered superior to the average users who go on a rampage to close as many threads as possible as not constructive based on their will. If you noticed carefully, Stackoverflow doesn't have an option for the average user to report moderator abuse. Atleast not easily anyway. If some dude marks a question as not constructive, you have to deal with it. That's a poor example of democracy and unfortunately, it exactly depicts the current model of democracy lives in. If you have some politician who isn't doing his job properly, you are left powerless - You can't throw him out of power easily. The laws are modulated to sustain his power as much as possible - You need many people to support your opinion, get together as a group, pass bills, etc. which needs to be approved by another set of corrupt committees which will most likely rule in favor of the politician himself..etc.
What we need is a more open world - Yes, more open than what we're living in right now. If someone does something wrong, then they must be served justice without any delay. The current scenario involves so much paperwork and hassles that it makes it worthless getting someone to be delivered justice in time. I wish we had a system like Hackernews, but for the real world, except without the mods (who are harmless here anyway) so we can have constructive decisions directly with one another without much effort to set right what's right and to pull off/flag something that's wrong ourselves without having to have someone at the top of us like a 'moderator' so you don't live at the mercy of his bias.
- msutherl 14y ago> I wish we had a system like Hackernews, but for the real world We do. It's call the Congress. It works, like Hackernews, because it's a small, elite group of people chosen to make decisions in a structured, democratic manner. This country was not founded on the ideal of democracy for the people, nor do I think it should have been. That would be mob rule and you can read all about why that's a bad idea. What we need to do now is curb corporate influence and corruption in Congress and figure out how to pick better leaders. Encouraging rational public debate, in a roundabout way, results in better leaders in the long run. The people make more informed votes and future politicians are raised in a more enlightened society.
- fakeer 14y ago|| and figure out how to pick better leaders. More important, IMHO, is - how to keep those elected leaders good, honest and in check!
- saraid216 14y agoCould someone actually cite these people who are holding up Stack Overflow and Github as bastions of democratic process? Because I'm more concerned by some random schmuck building a site supposedly about argumentation getting himself twisted up over a straw man. If you're going to play this game, you need to do marketing for your competitors by citing them, too. You've got no ethos here.
- icebraining 14y agoraises hand It's far from perfect, but considering that 99% of online communities out there are run in an autocratic way, with a person or clique appointing the "police" which is mostly non-accountable to the users (like HN, for example), having systems of public participation like SO's elections and places for discussion of its governance (Meta) puts it actually quite high in the democratic ranking.
- maxerickson 14y agohttp://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/pycon-github/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/pycon-github/ (I explicitly do not mean to raise a discussion of the context. It's just that the article does exactly what you are asking about, saying "It’s yet another way that GitHub is moving beyond software, helping to democratize the development of other stuff, including everything from laws and other legal documents to cartoons and even Wired articles.")
- icebraining 14y agoSO moderators are at least elected by their user base (yeah, with biases, of course) and well identified, while here on HN they're chosen in an autocrat model and are invisible to any kind of public scrutiny. You say they're harmless, but looking at the people being hellbanned¹, I'd say there's plenty of harm being done, with users spending months in their invisible prisons for no discernible reason. I think the fact that you harshly criticize SO and dismiss HN as harmless is interesting. ¹ Yeah, they might be banned by robots, but I don't think that makes it any better. It's not like the algorithms are independent entities.