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Announcement Discussion

[Announcement] [Discussion] Changes for The Agora

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.

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  • @[email protected] - I read your post in the "beehaw user's thread" and had some clarifying questions for the tally:

    • Does your tally exclude any votes that have already been removed by a moderator?
    • Why have some non-local votes been removed, while others remain?
    • Does non-local solely indicate accounts not on this instance, or does it include sock puppets of the same? What is the full list of criteria used to determine this?
    • Are there any other criteria you are using to exclude votes?

    I'm specifically asking because I've been trying to follow along and audit the current vote, but my tally isn't copacetic with yours. I assume I'm working with imperfect information, so I think it would be worth adding this level of clarity on voting qualifications to the Agora sidebar as well. A true democracy should be well codified; It would be a shame for the disparity to be down to me missing one buried comment somewhere.

    Thanks for the work you've been doing here.

    • Does your tally exclude any votes that have already been removed by a moderator?

      Why have some non-local votes been removed, while others remain?

      We were removing posts of people that were not instance members. However, since users cannot see what the post said, having a [Vote] post full of 'removed by moderator' can look like unfair vote manipulation on the moderator's part and, in addition, it was a lot of work to manually remove each post (the mod tools are... primitive). Instead of removing them we're just excluding them from the count. Each user's account has a 'local' flag that is checked by a script and if they're not a local user it doesn't add their vote to the tally.

      Does non-local solely indicate accounts not on this instance, or does it include sock puppets of the same? What is the full list of criteria used to determine this?

      Are there any other criteria you are using to exclude votes?

      We're having to check for sock puppet accounts manually at the moment. We have not excluded any local votes. There are not a HUGE amount of suspicious accounts (maybe 3-4 accounts who were created two weeks ago and have no comment or post history except for one vote) so we don't expect it to affect the final result.

      We'll probably need to have a discussion in the future as to what objective criteria we should use to determine if a person is an active community member in order to prevent any perception of bias.

      I’m specifically asking because I’ve been trying to follow along and audit the current vote, but my tally isn’t copacetic with yours. I assume I’m working with imperfect information, so I think it would be worth adding this level of clarity on voting qualifications to the Agora sidebar as well. A true democracy should be well codified; It would be a shame for the disparity to be down to me missing one buried comment somewhere.

      The final vote count will likely be done by hand with the script acting as an audit. If the script and the hand count match then we'll have a bit more confidence in it going forward. It's a very manual process currently.

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