In the early days of this site, it was common to flirt with the idea of running it more democratically. This was correctly deemed unfeasible during the Age of Struggle Sessions and the arbitrary dictatorship of the mods was cemented.
But maybe the problem wasn't democracy itself, but trying to jump the gun by modeling the site democracy after bourgeois or proletarian democracies. What we need to do is go back to the roots, reform the site to be more like ancient Athenian democracy.
I suggest the first reform is to implement a system of Ostrakismos, where once in a while there is a thread where we can name other users, and if one or more of these comments gets above a certain threshold of upvotes, the named user with the most upvotes on the comment gets banned for a year.
In seriousness, (at least) one person needs to hold the keys to the castle. This is just a consequence of how digital infrastructure operates..
On one hand, there are the digital keys - the SSH key to log into the server and assorted secrets for various services. These are needed to log in to the server and do maintainence - update the software, run database migrations, produce and safekeep backups, etc. This person has total control. This responsibility can be vested in more than one person, but then each of those people have total control, including the ability to remove access from other admins.
On the other hand, there are the physical keys. The website runs on a server somewhere. This server is in someone's physical custody. Whether it is an ISP, a server colocation facility, or under the admin's bed, that person also has total control.
We could vote for who has the keys, but all it takes to ruin us is one
to get in.
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