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 just had an idea. What if instead of a percentage of users in the instance, it’s a percentage of users that are subscribed to the agora. I don’t think subs are public, so it would have to be checked by an admin or bot. Maybe tallying and time limits could be done by the bot as well. I’m not too sure. Just throwing the idea out there.
Edit: Also I could help with development of a bot if needed. I don’t know how lemmy/fediverse works under the hood though :/
I just had the same thought :)
So how would you work out the final vote count based on that?
Ayes from unique users as a percentage of subscribers? Does the nay count carry any weight? What if it’s 51% Aye and %49 Nay?
I think it should just provide information rather than making conclusive decision of aye or nay, and humans should have the final say. There could be a count separating ayes and nays for subscribers and guests which the bot could put in a comment along with other stats.
As a side note: Here Randomocity says “Nay until some evidence is posted” and then evidence is posted, but a bot would still count that as nay. So maybe maybe have a symbol like
/aye. That could over complicate things though.I get what you’re saying but ultimately, the information the bot is providing would just be “the humans say they want this and meets the threshold they’ve set”.
It’s not making any decisions on its own.
To your point about “Nay until evidence”, that seems to me to be working as intended. A Nay is a Nay until the user changes their vote. You’d want the bot to count that.
I would have the bot work like this:
Find the total subscribed agora users.
Find the number of agora subscribers from this instance.
Assume every user from the local instance votes nay, then start reading replies.
For each reply, if the local subscriber uses the “aye” tag, change their vote to aye and record the timestamp for that reply.
A later reply with the “nay” tag should be able to undo that user’s previous approval.
The bot should report the counts each day and a final summary after the voting period has ended.
If it’s not over 51%, then the vote should fail to pass.