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.
I’ll pay you twelve dollars for the rights to your vote
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.
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:
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.
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.
Either would be a democracy, definitionally, though both are imperfect. I’d agree something needs to be done to fix the imperfections where possible