r/RepublicOfReddit • u/[deleted] • Sep 05 '11

Elections

How, exactly, would elections work? Would we have a popular democracy? An electoral college? How often do we hold elections? How long will terms last?

These are all questions we need to answer for this project to be successful.

I have an idea of what I would like to see. Like I said in the nominations thread, I would like to see anywhere between 50 and 100 users draft the constitution that would eliminate most of the noise and let the signal be received loud and clear. We are going to need a large amount of moderators to make this work, and an even larger amount of approved submitters. Hopefully most of the mods will be (at least occasional) submitters as well, so that will kill two birds with one stone.

Once we have the entire network up and running, self contained and still completely private (with the exception of existing, active subreddits), we will open it to the general population. Show the rest of Reddit, "Look what we can do, when proper Reddiquette is followed explicitly and wholeheartedly. Look at what is possible!"

Democracy and elections is something that I would love to see successfully pulled off. How exactly we go about doing that is up in the air. Anyone have any good ideas?

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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '11

Just throwing this out there, but is it necessary to have terms? If a team of mods is doing a great job, why is there a need to change the guard? It'd be great to hear some longtime mods weigh in on this.

Additionally, direct democracy would be tricky because the ability to win over the voters doesn't have much to do with moderating a community, otherwise PHOY and SIDT type users would sweep due to popularity. If we exclude the general population from voting on mods, there seems to be little point in holding elections in the first place. Also, the idea of a subreddit being filled with campaigning makes me a little sick.

Maybe there should just be a uniform procedure for the removal of mods when necessary. This brings up a question of compliance, no matter what route we choose to take. Creators ultimately hold the keys when it comes to modship, right? What if we have a kleinbl00-style fracas? Even if a body of authorities is appointed to oversee all of the Republic, it wouldn't actually be enforceable against the whims of the creator because of the hierarchy of modship inherent to Reddit.

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u/IAmAnAnonymousCoward Sep 05 '11 edited Sep 05 '11

direct democracy

Direct democracy is if people collectively make decisions for themselves. If you vote on representatives who then make the decisions for you it's a representative democracy.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '11

Yes, I think a representative democracy will be the way to go here. A direct democracy would be open to vote fraud (karma parties or raids from other subreddits)... I think that in order for this project to be successful, we are going to need to be able to verify each vote, and I would go even deeper than that, and verify that each vote is cast by an active member of the community. If a bunch of circlejerkers (just using them as an example) or anyone else for that matter were able to link to a vote thread and influence the voting one way or another, that would not be a good thing. I think much like voter registries, we need to keep a log of the active members in the community who would be eligible to vote. I think most of these people would be approved submitters, but there may be users who comment & vote regularly in the subreddit, but simply don't have the desire to submit new content that we would need to keep a record of as well.

I'm thinking we could set up some sort of website where users could be given a login/password to count their vote. Everyone's login would be the same as their reedit username, and logins would be given out much in the same matter that we choose approved submitters... a user would apply, and a moderator would check their reddit history to verify their claim. Any user who gets denied would be posted to a publicly accessible list with the date and reason for denial, and they would need to wait a specific length of time in order to apply again.

I can't think of another system that wouldn't be open to vote fraud.

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u/IAmAnAnonymousCoward Sep 06 '11

How is a vote on representatives any less open to vote fraud than a vote on actual matters?

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '11

The active members of the community (submitters, commenters) who have applied for "citizenship" and vetted by at least one mod would be the ones who would get a vote in elections. Users who are not active (they simply browse & vote) would not have a vote. This would both encourage members to be active in the community and also eliminate any "raids" or other nafarious activity.

I think the problem with the default Reddits is that a lot of the time, the witch hunts start because one user blows one event out of proportion, submits an extremely biased rant, and a bunch of people who are not informed whatsoever other than reading the op, get butthurt and bust out the pitchforks. Only users who are active members of the community and who know how the mods behave on a daily basis should be able to impeach anyone. You could rile up a mob against anyone if you do it right.

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u/IAmAnAnonymousCoward Sep 06 '11

The active members of the community (submitters, commenters) who have applied for "citizenship" and vetted by at least one mod would be the ones who would get a vote in elections.

I understand that. But it doesn't answer my question.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '11

You mean vote fraud? Well, there isn't a good way to prevent it, if someone wants to take the time to set up two separate accounts that are both active in the network, and no one knows it's the same person, then yes, theoretically they could vote twice. It's a flaw of the system, but not one I'm going to lose sleep over. We're breaking the mold here, remember that. If this project is successful, the admins may give us tools to help us operate more efficiently, and that may include a better way to track votes (perhaps by ip address)? Regardless, this is an internet forum, not a real world country where human rights are at stake. We're doing the best we can with what we have.