First, on behalf of @imaqtpie, @Seraph089 and myself, thank you all for choosing us to help run the community. We’re all really excited about the possibilities of both this instance and of The Agora community. We’re look forward to working with everyone to make this a great community. Feel free to reach out with any concerns or comments!
Ok, on to the announcement:
Today, I’m excited to share with you some pivotal updates set to streamline our interaction and decision-making processes within The Agora.
The first of these updates is about enhancing transparency. We have established a new and convenient way to track the outcomes of our community decisions. Simply visit this link: https://rentry.co/the_agora. This site will serve as the hub for all voting results, updated at the conclusion of each vote.
Next, let’s discuss the changes regarding the use of our existing [Discussion] and [Vote] tags. To foster clarity and improved interaction, all new posts should now carry the [Discussion] tag.
Regarding the [Vote] tags, we’re introducing a more structured approach here. Going forward, the [Vote]s will be initiated by the moderation team based on the week’s [Discussion] posts and will be posted each Friday and run to the following Friday. This gives ample time for each of us to participate in the decision-making process. Once a vote concludes, the corresponding thread will be locked and the results promptly updated on our new voting results webpage.
For [Vote] posts, your vote should only be cast as a top-level comment. To streamline the process, we ask that you refrain from responding to other votes in the same thread or making non-voting comments. Each [Vote] post will contain details on how to format your comments, and our moderation team will be available to ensure all comments are formatted correctly before the final vote count is tallied.
This is by no means the final process and we’re depending on your feedback and discussion to keep improving things going forward.
We understand the concerns about vote manipulation and the discussions around alternate voting methods (like ranked choice). Use this thread to discuss the changes and any concerns or suggestions that you have.
As of now, the tentative plan is to run with this for the first week, see how many issues exist that require voting, generate the vote threads, complete a round of votes and then iterate on the process once we can all see what works and what doesn’t work so well.
I believe the account should be a week old, and with a certain minimum number of comments. I’ve also seen the suggestion that the account needs to be active in more than just the Agora, and I agree with it. We want to ensure people aren’t making an account just to vote, and by having a minimum number of comments, we make it harder for one person to create multiple accounts.
And to combat nonsense or chatgpt comments made to get past the comment limit, we’ll all have to keep our eyes open and report them.
It takes a lot of wargaming to see what would work.
If you make it a minimum number of posts then we’ll get users reposting memes or content from other social media websites. If it’s a certain number of comments then a person could use LLM generated comments or, like on Reddit, just steal comments from other threads.
Having a classification system that could look at all user activity and then sorting them into buckets (normal user, possible alt, spam, bot, etc) based on training data would be nice but that’s a very complex project to embark on.
On the other hand just leaving it up to the moderation team to decide what is or isn’t an active user isn’t sustainable either. Who’s to know that we’re not disqualifying people who’re voting against our position or some other shady activities?
It’s a tough problem and definitely one to keep talking about.
I think it’ll come down to people keeping an eye out for shady things like you described. Just like a lock only keeps the honest out, people will find ways to break any rules we put in place.