I have seen many a democratic initiative ruined by trolls, bot accounts, duplicate accounts, and assholes. The best way to ensure that democracy doesn’t spiral into Haiti is to allow only financial contributors of $5 or more to vote (once the boss man has his contributions system up and running). You want to help build this community? OK, then put your money where your mouth is. To be clear, it should still be one vote per person, whether you donate $5 or $500.

  • earthling@kbin.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    As it stands, you could just create another account for $0 rather than paying for their vote. In fact, you could create a whole lot of them.

    • sorrybookbroke
      3·
      2 years ago

      That’s a good point. There are other solutions though that are less destructive. We could have timed verification, “karma” limits, lock it behind an application, only select participants, or only community mods which would lower the amount of false voters. Non of these are perfect, but neither is the donation gate.

      To echo myself in another comment:

      There are countless ways to trick that system and the trolls will be more dedicated than the average user. If someone really wants it a hundred bucks isn’t that hard to get, or to “find”. Especially if crypto is an option. If it’s 5 bucks to vote permanently, then that’s 5 bucks per vote, permanently. A person with more money and more accounts will have outsized power in this community.

      [this] selects a specific type of person too. As a dev, I understand how rare it is for a person to move into a paying role on a site.

      This minority of the instances population on an already small group will be those who most want power, not the most invested. That’s what 5 dollars gets you. Power. This is a poor idea.

      I understand your concern, but I disagree with the direction you’d take it. Only allowing paid users to vote creates a power inbalance and makes the more power hungry much more powerful, without really stopping them from making more accounts. Sure, it costs them more, but there will be much less competition to overcome.

      • earthling@kbin.social
        2·
        2 years ago

        I want to be clear that I wasn’t necessarily arguing for some type of paid option. Just that what we have now also isn’t democracy.

        • sorrybookbroke
          3·
          2 years ago

          Either would be a democracy, definitionally, though both are imperfect. I’d agree something needs to be done to fix the imperfections where possible