The Agora
In the spirit of the Ancient Greek Agora, we invite you to join our vibrant community - a contemporary meeting place for the exchange of ideas, inspired by the practices of old. Just as the Agora served as the heart of public life in Ancient Athens, our platform is designed to be the epicenter of meaningful discussion and thought-provoking dialogue.
Here, you are encouraged to speak your mind, share your insights, and engage in stimulating discussions. This is your opportunity to shape and influence our collective journey, just like the free citizens of Athens who gathered at the Agora to make significant decisions that impacted their society.
You're not alone in your quest for knowledge and understanding. In this community, you'll find support from like-minded individuals who, like you, are eager to explore new perspectives, challenge their preconceptions, and grow intellectually.
Remember, every voice matters and your contribution can make a difference. We believe that through open dialogue, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to discovery, we can foster a community that embodies the democratic spirit of the Agora in our modern world.
Community guidelines
New posts should begin with one of the following:
- [Question]
- [Discussion]
- [Poll]
Only moderators may create a [Vote] post.
Voting History & Results
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You're not wrong that the integrity of online voting is hard to protect - like, REALLY hard. However:
a) Our last vote on whether voting rights should be extended to members of other instances landed on it being sh.it.heads only. If it comes to a revote (or if the current vote thread is actually still live, it's not super clear to me how the pre-mod voting threads are being dealt with), that might change, but if it holds this at least cuts out the bot instance vector.
b) While you might be right about bots being in this instance (I have no hard facts to support replacing that 'might be' with 'are'), the community has bandied about different means of evaluating what other factors should matter for counting a user's vote. There is a LOT of disagreement on this at the moment, but whatever is finally landed on should be designed with bots and bad actors in mind (stuff like age of account, participation metrics [could extend to patterns that suggest human activity* v. bot activity, where/if possible], linked e-mail or donation, manual user evaluation, etc. etc.). I don't know if whatever's landed on will be successful, or if anything tried will be useless in practice, but I say shit, why not try? Hell, it's a long shot, but in the experiment we could land on something that works and could be ported to other instances - who knows?
While SysOp (and Council) as Benevolent Dictator - where there is no vote, but there is a suggestion box, and it is looked at and discussed by a small number of people who aren't ass-clowns - is the tried-and-tested method for online community governance, I say why not at least entertain the experiment? The absolute worst case scenario that happens is that it goes to shit, TheDude says fuck it and closes shop, and users migrate** to other instances. Sucks, but it's not life-threatening.
*I don't know about y'all, but for instance I edited this thing like 7 times over 30 minutes. I do this on pretty much all of my posts longer than 4 sentences. Is this routine practice of a bot or human? Is this information stored somewhere to evaluate my meatiness?
**There's a lot of hand-wringing about instance migration, as right now it pretty much means "Make a new account elsewhere and start from scratch". Doesn't matter all that much to me, but I'm also not the sentimental type - shit, my history here is some of the longest I've kept without pruning in a while. But as portability of accounts increases (which is a challenging, but insistent feature being asked for across many instances), this may turn into a complete nothingburger in general.