I'm absolutely against elections until the site is of an established and fortified size to be resilient to manipulation. We're talking 100k and above users with original subreddit levels of activity before I remotely support such a thing.
If you start elections now I 100% guarantee that factional fighting between ideologies will result in the complete collapse of everything.
That's not even considering external interests in seeing the site fail from the right wingers that would recognise it as a weakness.
Definitely this. I was a member at a small forum back in the day that held elections for mods, and it turned into an absolute shitfest. Ended with the admin just deleting the whole thing without warning, iirc it didn't even last a full year.
Once the numbers are up tho, then it might be worth giving it a shot.
If this is the plan -- and you bring up lots of good points -- there should be a date or criteria for elections announced up front. For example, something like "we have elections 3 months from the date we hit X number of subscribers."
I'm honestly still not sure when that would be. I'm still trying to process out the long term effects.
Look at wikipedia as an example of how organised, committed groups with nation-state backing have successfully created cabals of editors that liberalise all the content or engage in editing and revision wars in order to press the political goals.
It is an incredibly dangerous path and it fundamentally cedes power to those with money and time to commit to mass manipulation of the service. Now, obviously that's unlikely in the short term but if you're planning out the future path of this organisation you need to be looking at examples of past mistakes for hot NOT to do things. You also need to not be naive about the level of power and commitment they have, look at how reddit struggles to oppose manipulation, twitter bots, and the like. This is all in the sites future too, we can't naively believe that the userbase will just magically defend against such a thing through literally no means that they have to do so.
It needs considerable thought and we need people to write theory for it. I'm not joking.
Recall elections (maybe with a high threshold required to remove a mod) might be a viable solution. Say you have:
- An annual "airing of grievances" thread where -- if the community has a problem with a mod -- they can petition for a recall election for that individual mod. You need to get some percentage of the community to upvote a petition for each mod they want to vote on.
- If a petition successfully gains the requisite number of upvotes, you automatically have a recall election for that mod in 1 month.
- It takes a significantly higher threshold of upvotes to actually remove the mod via recall.
You could limit voting to users who have, say, at least 6-month-old accounts and 50+ comments. For whoever is nominated to replace a recalled mod you could require a more extensive history.
There's no foolproof way to prevent bad-faith actors from taking over, but you can make it a lot harder without dreaming up something too complicated.
Once the community spreads out a bit I assume things will run similarly to reddit, with different mods on different subs. I don’t really see how mod elections would really result in improved moderation (how do you or I know any random user will be a decent mod?) but mods should be recallable obviously if someone is abusing their power.
Recall elections seem like a good balance between accountability and simplicity. If you have the job and don't fuck it up, fine, cool, whatever. But if the community has recurring issues with you it's fair that they should have an opportunity to vote you out. If we get rolling with a good mod team this would also minimize the potential for bad-faith actors to come in, take power, and fuck things up.
I think it would be nice to give people time to get to know each other here first. Without that, we don't have many ways of knowing who anyone is or how they behave on here.
Yeah I think when they happen will depend on how quickly the site grows and the capacity of the current mods. That's kind of hard to build a roadmap for but i hope people keep mod elections in mind for the future.
mod elections would definitely be beneficial imo. specifically for individual communities too (which as of right now cannot be created without admin assistance, as far as i know), i hold no ill will against the current mods but i'd definitely prefer a democratic process here. obviously i don't think it'd be immediate (there's a lot going on right now and this definitely isn't their top priority, i get that) but in the coming weeks, or even months, once we see how things pan out it would definitely be good.
and like someone else said, obviously it'd be better to get to know the people here first so we can have a decent perspective on who would be responsible and transparent, well-meaning mods for communities in the first place. this is definitely something for the future but i hope it doesn't get forgotten down the line.
Community mod elections are on the cards once there’s some voting mechanisms built into the software.
Right now it’s operating on a broad mass line approach, rather than formal voting. Beatnik grabbed a bunch of volunteers initially, since there was a discord server with approx 10k people to organise. If the community at large raises concerns about any of them, they’ll stand down, as we’ve already seen happen.
A bigger question you might want to think about is around selection for participation in the Cooperative, and the wider dev team. This includes site-wide moderators, but isn’t limited to them. Again, this (loose) structure is currently made up of volunteers selected by Beatnik.
It’d be fair to describe the current approach as Democratic Centralism. Beatnik’s unelected, but has broad support of the community. Votes are taken every so often on issues that might be contentious. Mods for newly created communities are selected based off of peer approval.
The team is always monitoring the community to see if they’ve got it right. This sort of setup is appropriate for our current circumstances. As things move along, we can expect other mechanisms to emerge. These will include formal elections for some positions, like local community moderators. It’ll likely also include more sophisticated feedback mechanisms than the dev team constantly monitoring new messages on the Ark and here.
I was talking about the vouching approach over at !commrequest@hexbear.net. If you’re requesting a community and you want to mod it, it’s encouraged to have a few people from the Discord vouch for you.
