RIP Voting for important forum changes

[dkbit98]

And what would the point of voting be if The Big Thermos doesn't agree with the little coffee cups? No coffee for you!
Voting or polling would be the same, just a way of giving ourselves some importance as a facade.

Oh boy, some of you are very good in twisting things.

Don't worry. Theymos will live forever and nothing ever needs to change in forum.
You will still drink your hot coffee everyday and you never need to vote for facade change or anything else in life because everything is owned by somebody.

Regards.

[stompix]

Oh boy, some of you are very good in twisting things.

You could point out the things I'm twisting as I'm not really sure what you're referring to.

Don't worry. Theymos will live forever and nothing ever needs to change in forum.

I don't worry, by all chances I'll kick the bucket way before theymos, so with all sincerity, I can tell you I don't give a damn on what happens after.

You will still drink your hot coffee everyday and you never need to vote for facade change or anything else in life because everything is owned by somebody.

Well, now's the moment where indeed I will twist some things. 
Yes! Almost everything on this planet is owned by somebody, be it an individual or a group of individuals, and surprise, that's how bitcoin, the pinnacle of decentralization also works. My keys, my coins, my decision on what I do with them. You're voting on this is equal to zero.

You yourself said that theymos decision would be final, so, why should we even have a vote? Just to show we're not happy with him running the place?
We can do this right now, open a topic with a poll and let's see the results, and more importantly, let's see how you're going to keep the voting secret and at the same time ensure there are no votes from multiple accounts, all this without KYC.
Rather than jumping immediately to voting, how about we first make sure this system won't fuck the forum even worse than now?

[icopress]

All in all a good idea, but let's face it ... (even without taking into account the skeptical comments about it).

For everything to work, first you need to make changes to the voting system. Currently, during public voting, users can only make one choice, known as "bullet voting", which is not very convenient for some counting scenarios.

• To enable users to give preference to any number of items or candidates during voting.
• Identification of users participating in the survey (see here for how it looks).

And even if it was not an abstract discussion, there is one more catch. As far as I know, Cyrus and his team are focused on fixing some bugs, so I think it's pointless to talk about adding new features for now.

When the time comes, I think there will be a public discussion with the developers of the new features. Although most likely the new interface and voting options will be added only in Epochtalk, (do not forget that any improvement to the forum requires parallel changes in Epochtalk).

[OgNasty]

Trying to decentralize a public forum is like giving animals in the zoo an opinion on how they should be kept.  Seems like a fun idea until you see what the hyenas do.

[Welsh]

I know democracy is considered the better of the evils when it comes to leadership, but I'm actually against the idea here. I think it would be a waste of resources, when it comes to sorting out a proper voting system which would be transparent, figuring out the logistics, and then implementing it would be take away valuable time from other things. You sign up on this forum, and agree to abide by the rules, and probably are assumed to somewhat agree with how things work around here. However, if there are some bad decisions made at the top, or there's some dubious features implemented, then I would like to think that the community would rise up, and bring up their concerns, and I personally believe theymos to be quite open minded, and accepting on forum proposals because of various changes throughout the years.

We all asked for a system to bring better quality to the forum, and there was numerous complaints for a while, but the alternative solution proposed was to remove signature campaigns. Theymos, and whoever else was involved implementing the merit system, came up with a solution, that didn't take anything away from the forum, but probably did reduce the traffic to the forum (without verifying that myself).

Theymos, has demonstrated that they can identify complaints from the community, and come up with a solution which they believe to better the forum. Taking away signature campaigns, would have damaged the ecosystem of the forum, and I can see why someone would like to protect that. The merit system might not be absolutely perfect, and when is anything ever perfect? Its been pretty successful at what it was brought in to do.

Also, there is nothing stopping groups of users coming up with a priority list, and having public votes on changes. This could be a community driven effort, and the admins can take that into consideration possibly. Overall, I like your proposal, but I don't have any major complaints about how its been run now, and the changes that have been made. The merit system, and the bump system are the most recent additions, and to be honest probably have had a overwhelmingly positive effect on the forum, and I haven't always agreed with changes, and policies especially during my early years of the forum, but my views have certainly developed since then.

[PrimeNumber7]

The forum allows anonymous accounts, which means it is trivial for someone to create multiple accounts to cast multiple votes.

The forum also values free speech, even when the speech is unpopular or controversial. If voting to Un/ban someone is implemented, it would become difficult to say anything unpopular.

The forum can be reasonably compared to social media. The social media company sets the rules, and the market decides how much traffic and how many users use each social media platform. The social media companies accept feedback from their user base, but won’t make changes based on votes.

[KaneVWE]

The more I think about this decentralised governance in the way initially suggested is a big mistake.

Having individuals voting on other individuals is asking for trouble.

What is better is a set of objective standards or rules being thrashed out that are optimal for the forum.
This is the democratic or decentralized part. Although really even that is not essential a single entity could devise the entire thing.
The only important thing being it is as provably fair to all members as possible whilst being optimal to the goals of the forum.

Decentralization is an obsession here so we try to apply it to everything.
I have been rethinking this lately.
I mean it's simply not sensible for members to vote specifically on other members. it is impossible to prevent personal bias either for that individual or for another members opinion of that individual. It works via contagion it need not be direct.

The decentralized part needs to be directed towards a set of parameters or rules.
Voting is a certain member should have certain action taken against him or her or it is not sensible.

If the parameters don't decide automatically they need to be tightened up.

Whether you implement KYC or not isn't important.

Like i say even the deciding on the rules or parameters it's nice to have everyone involved and you may increase the probability of immediately arriving at the optimal rules to attain the goals of the forum but really one super smet person could actually be responsible for proposing everything. That's if the forum is owned by a single entity that lays out the goals. If not then yes it is going to take a kind of vote to ascertain what the goals are in the first place.


Since we have a single entity controlling and I guess the goal of creating an environment from which the most powerful community which are optimally suited to promulgate the awareness and adoption of bitcoin... then we have a good start.

I mean the forum has done amazing in that regard really but then it was a once in a generation or greater " product" to encourage Intersest and adoption in. So yeah really the forum has done its job already. Bitcoin has reached critical mass now and I don't see anything stopping it. You could say the forum is redundant or even slightly counter productive to that goal since it now provides a launch pad for competing " products ".

Depends on the goal. I guess only satoshi and maybe a handful of people know the goal of both bitcoin and the forum.
Many people have some wild speculations.
I like to believe it was to provide transparency and give everyone a fair chance to easily and immediately see where they stand currently and if they want to join in under those conditions without the goal posts constantly moving to demoralize and crush them continuously on the whim of a tiny tiny tiny minority.
So I'm supporting it anyway. I would still want to join and start even now if I'd only just found out about it.
Who knows.

TL DR = numbers mean nothing. Debate and thrash out the optimal action.

10000000 retards vs 1 genius.  I go with what the genius thinks is best.  Voting means ?

I mean I'm not 100% sure how you identify a real genius because likely to be a real genius you will need to best those that are near geniuses on topics that test them and most of us don't understand. However with most debates certain points will start to be unarguably stronger or won conclusively by one party so you can get some idea who is dominant unless it's super technical. Then you're screwed.

With governance I'm sure the debates can be dumbed down enough we can all contribute to some degree when compiling the transparent,  clear cut rules. The thing about debate is really deciphering when certain points have been conclusively debunked or demonstrated to be suboptimal.

Likely a mathematician could resolve it best but then there goes your democratic or decentralized contribution.
All those wiggles and squiggles ... what is that shit?
I'm gonna learn me some math one day.

The more I think about forums the more I wonder if all this decentralized idealism is needed. The only decentralization you need is debating and reasoning. Just to throw more into the mix that may have been missed. Still the smartest people will process it best.
Optimal transparent rules applied equally = optimal governance if you want good moral and atmosphere. If you don't care about that then its true you could have different rules applied differently to different people and scenarios. I wouldn't agree with that.

Edit - I just notice a couple of posts that covered of what I hacked out  anyway. Still you got another bite at the cherry.

[Smartvirus]

Voting is a very reasonable aspect of a democratic society that very much defines or shows the people's opinion put together but then, it's not at all times that the entire people of a community is been allowed to vote on matters. There are already rules and these rules are the main governance of the forum. The administrators only see fit to effect the rules when faulted. Besides, implementing voting as a decision process creates an opportunity for some users the need to by pass the rules. The voting process is already going to be met with some problems:

1. A user can have 5-10 Alts in the forum
2. Voting won't be obligatory and as such, a lot of persons won't see the need to vote
3. Not all forum users pay attention to pinned posts and visit all boards to get notified of an activity such as this and it could be that they would have had a say as well
4. The criterias for voting is based on individual judgement and lack of experience by some users could fault the decision making
5. The transparency of the whole process would be questionable
6. Decision on what kind of issue to be put to a vote is another problem

With these and others not mentioned being the case, there isn't any need. Should their be a reason for a vote, it could be done by the moderators of various boards as we could view them as the representatives of all sections in the forum. This is pretty much the same way the forum is as, unban appeals are mostly deliberated upon by ranked up and experienced users. Though, the decision making is always left with the administrator as it should be.

[dkbit98]

Voting simply does not work in this forum, as shown in recent Voting for Worst interview in bitcointalk:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5294957

I am closing this topic now.

RIP VOTING