In the early days of this site, it was common to flirt with the idea of running it more democratically. This was correctly deemed unfeasible during the Age of Struggle Sessions and the arbitrary dictatorship of the mods was cemented.
But maybe the problem wasn’t democracy itself, but trying to jump the gun by modeling the site democracy after bourgeois or proletarian democracies. What we need to do is go back to the roots, reform the site to be more like ancient Athenian democracy.
I suggest the first reform is to implement a system of Ostrakismos, where once in a while there is a thread where we can name other users, and if one or more of these comments gets above a certain threshold of upvotes, the named user with the most upvotes on the comment gets banned for a year.
and every time we overwhelmingly vote yes, stuck in a loop of getting tired of a joke but thinking voting against the logical choice is funny, which rejuvenates the lame bit. eventually it will just be garfield posting, 100% of the time in pure earnest
🍤 carcinisation 🦀 garfinisation
We’ll vote out the polls!