stardust_witch wrote
Reply to comment by sudo in Let's talk about voting for mods and other procedures by ziq
Then, at the end, whoever received the plurality should be elected.
I don't see any good reason why votes on moderators should be competitive. Moderators as individuals shouldn't be stand-ins for ideological positions about moderating; the norms surrounding the job should probably be something determined separately (as much as is possible, anyway; even the best norms will likely still leave some aspects of the job open to interpretation) from the people who do it.
sudo wrote
How would they be elected non-competitively? I don't see a way to have an election with 2 or more people in it that wouldn't be competitive.
Also, welcome to raddit! It's good to see a new user here.
stardust_witch wrote
The same way you would (ostensibly) vote on any other proposal: X should become a moderator, y/n? Unless there's a reason I'm not seeing why you think the number of moderator positions need to be limited, I can't think of why it's the kind of thing where people should have to compete with each other. If two people want to be a moderator, then have a separate vote for each person. No biggie, right?
sudo wrote
you think the number of moderator positions need to be limited
I do think there shouldn't be more moderators than necessary. The only point of having them is to remove spam, and warn/ban users that step out of line. We shouldn't think of moderators as MVPs, just as members of the community with some extra responsibilities.
aiwendil wrote
It is no biggie until somebody wants to do things that step on the other mods toes and then everybody is angry at each other. I've seen that happen with mods that were not democratically elected. Also whatever method we use for voting needs to be bot proof, because I could see those fuckers on voat coming over and rigging votes to get mods installed and subvert things here. I know this is the same concern Castro always cited for not having democratic elections in Cuba, but it is a legitimate concern for both Cuba and Raddle.
Because of these undemocratic elements that will abuse democracy for their own goals, we need to be very thoughtful in how we ensure that 1 person is 1 vote. I think that we need to have something in place to be able to correlate a tor user to an account that has had to go through a number of difficult to automate steps. With non-tor users IP address would be enough of a control measure, but I think putting together the system I've mentioned in other threads where we have some sort of tor cookie tied to a valid email address, even if the email is anonymous, will make doing this easier too. We could have votes from tor accounts be confirmed via that email address, as well as some sort of captcha(I don't support recaptcha, so hopefully we can find or build a better solution), but I will defer to those technically implementing this.
Anyway, back to my initial point, I think that we might need to have some public system on which mods decide issues together if we are going to have multiple mods like you suggest and then have a way to remove a mod that is behaving poorly.
I don't think we can underestimate potential adversaries in their willingness to undermine our processes.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments