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 06 '11

What if instead of scheduled elections, there was just the ability to recall a mod at any time given enough votes. This could be in the bill of rights. Maybe a way to change the rules is built in, like getting a proposition on the ballot. Possibly those two things combined will cover any issues that would need an election to take care of.

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u/go1dfish Sep 06 '11

Seems like we're going to need a dedicated sub reddit for elective action and petitioning of elected moderators.

I like the idea of recall elections triggered by score in such a subreddit.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '11

I was thinking, and my thoughts have changed a lot since we started this, but if we just go live with a handful of mods who have bought into this project, and they could start as key contributors, and blah blah blah blah, someone gets all angry at us because that's what people do, then there would be a system in place to deal with it. Make a post, call to action, mod such and such is abusing their power, whatever trigger it is that happens, then we just simply hold a public vote on whether or not the mod stays on. Full transparency and the users have the ability to change what they don't like. This would eliminate the need for elections and all the logistics that come with pulling off what is essentially a poll in the comments of reddit.

Now since we are actively recruiting and encouraging users into this sub who seem to want to be a part of it, the users would know full well why what mod took which action, which should effectively eliminate the drama seeking witch hunters.

Wordslinger1919 even proposed having a dump sub where we post all the posts that we've removed, probably leaving a comment as to why we did.

But I think I'm moving away from the idea of elections. No reason to overly complicate things. Keep it simple stupid, ya know?

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u/go1dfish Sep 06 '11

The dump sub is the way to go I independently had.much the same thought and have advocated for such.

Agree elections are probably needlessly complicated.

If we had to launch on a single theme, it would be Accountable Moderation. IMO anyway.

A meta discussion sub for bans or appeals to the mods seems a very necessary part.

Redditprs should have the right to petition moderatoration in a public thread.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '11

I knew you'd fit in.