What kind of threshold should a vote have to pass before being implemented? Do we really want to be making changes based on a vote that only got one “Aye”? Ten Ayes? Over 50% of the user base?
What kind of vote engagement can we reasonably expect to achieve? Is it actually likely that 50% of the user base will engage with any particular vote? Are there any useful presidents out there?
Who should be responsible for counting the votes when they’re over? Perhaps the OP tallies the votes and edits the post?
Is there an easy test the mods can apply to a tallied vote to allow them to check whether it’s passed? Something that is not open to interpretation and results in a clear directive to make a change?
I’m also kind of testing out this discussion format as a way of generating things to vote on i.e DISCUSSION > POLL > VOTE seems to make sense.
We’ll see :)
I’m doubtful a quorum of 50% would happen, I imagine the majority of users will not participate in voting. I think if we set that as the threshold, nothing would ever get done. We might as well shutter the community. Maybe that many would vote if it were a defederation issue, but I still doubt it.
I think the proposer should tally votes. It should be easy to check the OPs math and bring up any discrepancies.
I like the discussion-> poll -> vote idea, but I’m not sure if most proposals will be large enough to require it.
Finally what about time limits? I’ve seen others says votes should be up for 3 days, or even 7 days which seems like a lot to me.
I was about to go start a discussion on exactly this issue:
I really believe that we need a discussion step before any vote. Sometimes, an idea isn’t fully fleshed out. Sometimes, there’s an angle almost nobody considered. We do need at least a day or 2 of discussion before something goes to a vote.
EDIT: Also, in regards to the ongoing vote, I think anyone from across the fediverse should be able to start the discussion step, but only a member of this instance can push it to a vote afterwards.
The discussion step is there for the OP to convince people that the move is a beneficial one, opposing views aired, discussed, dug into, and then a new post is put up as a vote where the only comments allowed are “Aye” and “Nay”
Look at this “vote”, for example. It’s all just discussion. Nobody is actually voting. I think people do agree with this format instinctively, it just hasn’t been set up yet.
The idea of opening the floor for discussion to everyone is interesting but I think that sort of means we can’t use subscriber count as a way of scoring votes.
My thinking was the subscriber count is a smaller subset of the total user base and will be made up of people who are specifically invested in participating.
What happens if you have subscribers to the Agora who aren’t actually part of the wider shit just works user base and who also can’t vote?
I don’t think we need to overcomplicate that at this step. We could use something like 10-20% of daily active users on the instance or something as the minimum quorum, for example. Low enough to be do-able, high enough to not be 3 dudes voting.
Fair point, I suppose it’ll become obvious if it starts being abused.
You have to filter the count by the instance to find the correct number.
I think a discussion for 3 days that allows anyone to participate followed by 7 days of voting, only by local accounts, makes sense.
Even if I were away for a week, I’d be likely to see the discussion before or the vote after.
Yeah, I don’t think 50% is realistic either, I’m just trying to work out if there’s a way of usefully measuring engagement.
It may be that expressing votes as a percentage of the user base it still helpful, it’s just that the threshold needs to be lower.
Or, what about measuring against subscribers to the Agora? The sidebar says we have 109 subscribers at the moment, the top post has 55 comments - that seems to be a more useful ratio.
sounds sensible
I think we should accept any proposal only after it exceeds 51% of the agora subscribers who are on this instance.
(Remember, federation means you can subscribe to this community from many instances.)
Regarding timescales, I added this to your other post but I think that would be perfect for testing out polling.
Hows that going to work anyway? There’s no native poll option is there?
Was thinking having a vote be #1 in Agora for 7 days might be an interesting pass metric. Would guarantee anyone who visited saw it. Would also naturally slow down rule changes and build a cooling off period so things don’t get passed because of some temporary kerfuffle.
I’m thinking we need a bot to handle all this. Check for quorum, track vote timelines, tally votes after it closes, administer polls, probably other stuff I’m missing
Yeah, a few people have mentioned this and it would seem to make sense.
There are a few Lemmy bots on GitHub https://github.com/topics/lemmy-bot, I guess that would need involvement from the mods.
Is there something that handles nuanced option taking? like more than 2 options … like i suggested in a separate comment, systemic consensing?
We need to construct a vote ballot, then use up voting on the options you approve of.
This is approval voting and has excellent behaviors compared to most other voting systems
Ideally, voting would happen in a community that only allows local users to subscribe or vote.
If that’s not possible in Lemmy, at the moment, something with access to the database could do the checking and report the results, I think.
Actually, i like weighted disapproval voting, because it counteracts mob approval following (better word?) to some extent. People are incentivised to think about how much any option (and there could be silly ones just for the sake of it) would go against their favours. I’d consider it intellectually mature if people could collectively establish such a system. But doesn’t look like it …
One thing that would be nice to have is a “neutral/abstine” vote. While this can be substituted by commenting, the latter would allow double voting.
How about announcing discussions for vote (pinned message/ sidebar), then just setting a time limit that makes it likely a fair amount of vote-interested and active people would have seen it? I’d find 1 week sensible but it could also vary by the gravity/complexity of the subject.