For example, for me, here are some things I wish to see (or would implement in my design) :
- design around ease of self-hosting. A non technical user must be able to self host easily and at a very low cost.
- Embrace content sorting and filtering algorithms, but on the client side, with optional control by the user.
- Standardize tags on all content. So many of the different ways different platforms classify or organize content can be implemented as tags, which increases interoperability between them.
- Abandon obsession with real-time-first implementations for use cases that don’t explicitly need it.
- Transferable user identity (between instances)
- User identity and authentication as separate service from social network instance
Would love to hear yours!
Yes, surely. I mean we’re a bit in a different situation in a digital place. Votes are way easier here (than in real life) and we can easily automate it into bigger processes.
For example I could envision something like a jury to make judiciary decisions. Not sure if that counts as direct democracy… But we don’t have to ask everyone about every moderation decision. Maybe just grant everyone the ability to report stuff and then the software goes ahead and samples 15 random people from the community (who arent part of the drama) and makes them decide. I believe that could help with fatigue. And speeds it up, we can just set the software to take people who are online right now, and discard and replace them if they don’t get at it asap.
Or make it not entirely direct, but at least do away with the hierarchies in a representative democracy. Instead of appointing moderators, we’d form a web of trust. I’m completely free to delegate power to arbitrary people and if my web of trusted people arrive at a score of 30 it’s spam, it is spam for me. And someone else could have a different perspective on the network. That’d help with all the coordination as well, because I can just not care, and the platform automatically delegates the power. And once I do care, I’m free to vote and that spares other people the effort to do the same. That’d at least make it direct in a way that we’re all moderators and users at the same time.
Of course democracy is a trade-off. And there’s a million edge cases, and we need some other things which go along with it. Accountability and transparency. We’d need an appeal process, for example with my first example if the jury doesn’t do a good job.
I’m probably not at a 100% perfect solution with these ideas. But I’m fairly sure we’d be able to do way more in a software-driven platform than the analogies we can take from countries and their approach at decision making. Especially regarding hierarchies within the system. However, things also clash. Transparency might be opposed to privacy. We have a lot more abuse on the internet than in the real world and it’s maybe not just easier to do votes here, but also easier to manipulate them, than what we’d take inspiration from in the offline world.
I love it as well. Though, from a software developers perspective, it rarely goes all the way. There’s just so many technical decisions to be made, limitations, vague requirements, contradictions. Sometimes users think they want something but they really need the opposite of it… And they always want wildly different things and more often than not it’s not healthy for the projects to approach it that way. They’d instead do it in order as mandated by the technical design, have more pressing issues and all of that is buried beneath layers of technical complexity. So the users hardly know what’s appropriate to do. I believe that’s why we often gravitate to the “benevolent dictator” model in Free Software. Or why some regular (paid) software projects fail or exceed budged and time planning.
It should be that way, though. If software is meant for users, the developers should probably listen to them, so I love what these projects do, to at least augment their development process with some participation and guidance by the target audience. And some people are really good at it. (Edit: And we might have elements of a meritocracy as well, and people need programming skills to participate in some ways… So, I think we might not be able to do more than try to make it as democratic as possible. At least as far as we’re talking about the development process itself.)