Read the original article
Comments
What are some strategies a platform like this can take against spam or influence bots? Tying real life identities to users would certainly limit that(though identity theft and account selling could still happen), but that adds friction to joining, poses security risks, and many people might feel less comfortable putting their opinions openly online where backlash could impact real life.
eID is the obvious answer here in Europe. Right now it's kinda scattered with different providers, but I believe EU is working on a more universal protocol. Unfortnately there are rumors it will require official Google/Apple play stores, unrooted devices, and all that it does today already.
But it should be treated as a relatively safe ID, it's even used for voting. If you feel uncomfortable, just have one device for eID, and one for everything else.
I think it's a great tool if we want to implement some sort of liquid democracy feature.
By econ 2026-02-1320:57 I really want this to be as simple as forwarding the user through a gov website and receiving a hash on a webhook. All I really want to know is that it is a citizen and the same hash as last time
By longfacehorrace 2026-02-130:322 reply So a local ballot box.
Host a platform like this at city hall, county building, capitol building, schools.
Only a human can access a terminal. Have humans monitor ingress/egress.
A more generalized solution that solves the specific problem inherent to all these digital ones.
If it requires me to leave the house, that increase in friction will mean I will vote maybe on 1/100th what I would otherwise vote on. I suspect pretty much everyone is the same
By theroncross 2026-02-1316:052 reply This is true of methods that don't require you to leave the house as well. Internet forums of all types are dominated by frequent users (by definition). People who are doing other things (working, raising families, living with disabilities that make participation difficult) are under-represented. Most of us just want someone with culturally normal values and competency to take care business. Many democratic systems do not select for people with culturally normal values and competency, unfortunately.
By nathan_compton 2026-02-1317:232 reply "Culturally normal values" is such a crazily loaded phrase. I personally don't have a strong desire to see people with culturally normal values be in charge, since, as far as I can tell, the "normal" person is neither very smart nor very thoughtful.
By econ 2026-02-1321:03 The lack of ambition is terrifying.
By longfacehorrace 2026-02-1319:011 reply It's "culturally normal" for first worlders like us to thoughtlessly dump production of material needs on 12 year old sweatshop workers in Asia.
You have a point but I am not sure it is the one you intended.
By theroncross 2026-02-1516:55 I believe moral opposition to child labor is a widely held view, and that most politicians, if pressed, would be in favor of writing laws to eliminate it. There are many reasons that pressure isn't applied, but it being a culturally abnormal view isn't one of them.
By clcaev 2026-02-1316:41 In my experience, neighborhood and municipal governance often works unreasonably well with life-long public servants who, even if not be the most brilliant of us, diligently work every day like the rest of us.
Technology must assist local, bottom-up governance, rather than being supplanted.
By sellmesoap 2026-02-1311:451 reply Makes it hard for those with disabilities, overbearing work hours and family commitments, folks in the most need to have their voice heard?
And this is different from current town halls how? If you have an important issue to you, there are ways to be heard, and they aren't always convenient.
This is how representative democracy is meant to work... you work/talk with your local representatives who work as part of a larger body on your behalf. Part of the problem in the US is we stopped growing the House of Representatives, which should be about 4-5x the size that it currently is, so you have much closer local representatives.
By sellmesoap 2026-02-1320:181 reply My experience with my local town hall is that they are realestate developers looking to green light their nepo-projects, they don't even know the basic nomenclature of a committee. And when they want to borrow $90,000,000 to make a survailance center at a bad interest rate for a population of ~100,000 and the locals lose their shit over it, the first thing they try to do is ditch the process that allowed the people to petition to say no to the project. The last city manager and then the CFO -> inturm manager have been fired for inapproprate use of city funds (or being a different skin color in one case, I can't tell from the news reports.) And town hall meetings are held adjacent to a rough homeless hangout and an elevator or two deep for those with mobility issues. So I have hope that things like polis can help, my local system needs a flush out. Bots are a scourage for stuff like this as well, so deffinetly a complex problem space!
By tracker1 2026-02-1415:14 And this is why it's important to actually be involved in local politics... And probably a prime example of why libertarian values and limitations are probably better.
We've lost our sense of culture, purpose, pride and nationality with each generation. And while a lot of it may have been mostly propaganda, there's something to be said for civic cohesion.
We really need proof of soul systems to exist, extended to also have a proof of citizenship. While the proof of soul systems can plausible be done in a decentralized manner, proof of citizenship is much harder, and in my opinion this is one of (the few) things the government should really do.
By worldsayshi 2026-02-1222:443 reply What about Zero-Knowledge Identity? Use zero knowledge proofs to prove that I have an eID without actually providing my identity.
EFF has a good write-up about zero-knowledge: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/zero-knowledge-proofs-...
> What ZKPs don’t do is mitigate verifier abuse or limit their requests, such as over-asking for information they don’t need or limiting the number of times they request your age over time. They don’t prevent websites or applications from collecting other kinds of observable personally identifiable information like your IP address or other device information while interacting with them.
By notTooFarGone 2026-02-1311:081 reply The arguments they make is a good example of "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".
If we allow incumbents to make photo age verification and upload of ID to third-parties to be the solution, we will have a much worse solution.
By worldsayshi 2026-02-1311:15 Exactly. And I do think that a world where zkp ids are taken for granted is one where the issues they point to will be more surmountable than today.
By worldsayshi 2026-02-138:41 Interesting. While that is true I don't see how it's an argument against. Over-asking + ZKP certainly seems superior to over-asking + without ZKP. Without ZKP in a world where you constantly need to identify yourself you have absolutely no privacy.
And going forward I think that any communication without establishing some kind of trust boundary will just be noise.
By frogperson 2026-02-1223:091 reply Something like a cert chain, but it would need to be both simple to use and secure. Those two requirements are greatly at odds with each other.
Yeah one reason I think the government has to offer this is usability. While you can imagine a purely p2p protocol between cypherpunks, for everyone else there needs to be a way to social workers, DMV staff, etc can deal with edge cases (such as your id being stolen and needing a reset). Furthermore it helps if it's super illegal to tamper with this network (consider how rare check fraud is, despite being easy).
By fc417fc802 2026-02-132:21 Check fraud is easy to commit but not easy to get away with while also benefiting financially.
It's also illegal to steal things but that happens much more frequently because it's often fairly easy to get away with.
By acgourley 2026-02-1223:32 Yes that's the idea, once you have the soul-bound eID the ZK part is trivial, but the eID with the guarantees I outlined is not at all trivial.
Either I'm not sure what you mean by soul, or you are all-in on dualism.
Sorry the term of art is really soulbound identity right now, I use POS but it's less common. Definitions vary but I say a useful system must allow people to endorse statements with evidence they are a) alive b) not able to be represented by more than one identity (id is linked to your entire soul, not a persona or facet of your being) c) a kind of socially recognized person (human in the expected case)
and then layer on citizenship on top if you want to use this for polling, voting, etc.
By protocolture 2026-02-130:222 reply How would this work considering that the soul is an entirely fictional concept?
By FunHearing3443 2026-02-1314:53 “Empirically unprovable” and “fictional” are not synonymous.
By throwup238 2026-02-1223:331 reply All you have to do is flip the tortoise back over.
> You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
By Lerc 2026-02-131:19 The point of the test is to see if the subject has had life experience enough that they could restrain their own empathy.
Wanting to flip the tortoise back over was why he failed the test.
By matltc 2026-02-1414:16 Meaning you have specified a SOUL.md at user- or project-level
By nerdsniper 2026-02-1222:34 Worldcoin tried to solve that. Any solution for this will be similarly creepy.
By observationist 2026-02-1222:531 reply The casual ginger hate is disgusting. smh.
It's funny to think of how the US government is effectively a decentralized web of trust system. Building one that works, that has sufficient network effects, auditability, accountability, enforcability, so that when things are maliciously exploited, or people make mistakes, your system is robust and resilient - these are profound technically difficult challenges.
The US government effectively has to operate IDs under a web of trust, with 50 units sitting at the top, and a around 3,000 county sub-units, each of which are handling anywhere from 0 to 88 sub-units of towns, cities, other community structures.
Each community then deals with one or more hospitals, one or more doctors in each hospital, and every time a baby is born, they get some paperwork filled out, filed upward through the hierarchy of institutions, shared at the top level between the massive distributed database of social security numbers, and there are laws and regulations and officials in charge of making sure each link in the chain is where it needs to be and operates according to a standard protocol.
At any rate - ID is hard. You've gotta have rules and enforcement, accountability and due process, transparency and auditing, and you end up with something that looks a bit like a ledger or a blockchain. Getting a working blockchain running is almost trivial at this point, or building on any of the myriad existing blockchains. The hard part is the network incentives. It can't be centralized - no signing up for an account on some website. Federated or domain based ID can be good, but they're too technical and dependent on other nations and states. The incentives have to line up, too; if it's too low friction and easy, it'll constantly get exploited and scammed at a low level. If it's too high friction and difficult, nobody will want to bother with it.
Absent a compelling reason to participate, people need to be compelled into these ID schemes, and if they're used for important things, they need a corresponding level of enforcement, and force, backing them up, with due process. You can't run it like a gmail account, because then it's not reliable as a source of truth, and so on.
I don't know if there's a singular, technological fix, short of incorruptible AGI that we can trust to run things for us following an explicit set of rules, with protocols that allow any arbitrary independent number of networks and nodes and individuals to participate.
By acgourley 2026-02-1223:48 > they need a corresponding level of enforcement
Yes 100%, that's why the government needs to offer it, make tampering a serious offense, and dynamically defend its integrity from attackers.
> incorruptible AGI
Not a lot of alpha in planning for scenarios where we get that
By gpm 2026-02-1223:14 The invite-tree they discuss is likely an effective measure. It provides a way of tracking back influxes of bots to responsible pre-existing account(s) and banning them too. And if someone is responsible for inviting many of the pre-existing accounts them too... Making the game of whac-a-mole winnable.
I'm assuming it's equivalent to lobste.rs implementation: https://lobste.rs/about#invitations
The cost of this is adding a ton of friction to joining.
I'm also somewhat curious about how "hateful content" is defined... I mean having a serious discussion on policies around children in schools and sport regarding trans issues has been labelled in some circles as hateful content if it doesn't blindly support the most progressive views.
I'm just using this as a specific example. Not saying that there aren't hateful sentiments or people behind comments or positions... only that depending on how such policies are interpreted you can't even debate sensitive issues.
By thinkingtoilet 2026-02-1320:332 reply Sigh... you know there's single digits number of trans athletes in the entire NCAA. The fact that this is even discussed at all is absurd given what else is going on in the country. Yes, intelligent people can have a conversation about it but even if you think it's a problem it's problem #43,948 on the list. Let's solve the other 43,947 problems first. It's really hard to believe people when they say it's not about bigotry. And it in every instance I've encountered people talking about it I would easily, and correctly, classify it has "hateful".
By tracker1 2026-02-1415:18 If I identify as a dog, should you be required to acknowledge and endorse that?
Now, scratch my belly and pay for my hair and tall implants with your taxes.
It's discussed because it's representative of a broader disagreement. People are rejecting the idea that 'woman' is nothing more than an identity that men can choose to appropriate, and are opposed to having this idea imposed upon society in law and policy.
It's such an unpopular idea for so many different reasons that this has managed to unify some very different groups of people in opposition: feminists, conservatives, disaffected liberals, and many others.
By tracker1 2026-02-1415:20 Exactly... And the reaction above is exactly why it's become difficult to even discuss because so many just dismiss the concern.
For many purposes, we need anonymous authentication. I haven't heard about much innovation on that and similar privacy fronts in awhile.
Off the top of my head, a possible method is a proxy or two or three, each handling different components of authentication and without knowledge of the other components. They return a token with validity properties (such as duration, level of service). All the vendor (e.g., Polis) would know is the validity of the token.
I'm sure others have thought about it more ...
By ianburrell 2026-02-134:23 You could do it now with OpenID SSO that only takes passkeys. The downside is that losing the passkey would lose the account. The problem is that OpenID leaks the authenticating sites to authentication site.
The problem is that lots of sites need/want email address. So would need system for anonymous email, and that would either need real email to forward, or way to read email.
By worldsayshi 2026-02-1222:47 I mean I can prove with a zero-knowledge-proof that have solved a Sudoku puzzle without actually giving away the solution so this seems possible?
There are so many things here that can work:
- Not having just upvote or downvote, but upvote as funny or insightful (slashdot)
- Not allowing to vote or comment until some karma has been reached (new accounts inflame topics and disappear later, having influenced).
- Invite only so one can block while chain of accounts.
- Not allowing to vote or comment every day or every hour, but randomly (more difficult for bots)
- Automatically downvoting posts with grammatical or low-effort errors.
- Having a way to allow replies only from the account you are answering to (so that bots do not switch places while moving the topic).
- Post history public (on reddit it can be made private, so a bot is posting hate in many communities and one cannot cross-check)
- Some sort of graph of statistics of accounts that comment together.
- Paying a small amount as friction for bots (linked to card, etc.)
I guess with AI there would be even more. These are some from the top of my head.
By rwmj 2026-02-1311:16 Slashdot didn't allow you to vote and comment on the same topic. (If you voted, then commented, your votes on the post were rescinded.)
> Automatically downvoting posts with grammatical or low-effort errors.
So allow only LLM generated posts?
People are capable of writing correctly. Source: your post.
If someone cannot be bothered, why should we bother to read what they have to say? I think it is a good signal.
EDIT: plus it is not an allow or not allow. The more errors the more downvoted, so it is a small adjustment.
You shouldn't care about presentation but others will.
I think an llm approach could be good. You make suggestions in however insane language and it converts the format to something boring and mundane accepted by all clients.
Some people are to brief, some elaborate more than necessary.
> You shouldn't care about presentation
Says who? Having good grammar is a signal that the person cares enough. I am surprised more forums do not use this signal.
By econ 2026-02-275:04 milton h. erickson developed conversational hypnosis to bypass the conscious mind. This is of course a great accomplishment in the field.
It also had me completely convinced that one should only listen to what is said rather than how.
So, (lol) with me you score extra points if you properly em dash but not the kind of points one would want.
By mejutoco 2026-02-2213:15 If you provide some example word plays we can verify if that is true. I disagree personally.
By renato_shira 2026-02-1223:402 reply [dead]
By kipukun 2026-02-131:02 I'd like to add to your point that private torrent trackers have had invite tree systems for awhile, and usually if your invitee breaks a rule, you get in trouble as well, so you are encouraged to only invite people you trust. The system has worked well for a long time, and some of these communities still thrive because of the trust that is built.
By cosmic_cheese 2026-02-133:451 reply It might be an unpopular idea, but I think being somewhat liberal with doling out timeouts and bans for inflammatory/reactionary/overemotional posting would do a lot of good, too. It strongly crystalizes community norms and sends a message that this is a space to engage with the higher functioning portions of your brain instead of letting your amygdala and dopamine pathways take the wheel.
Edit: Why is parent comment flagged/dead? Doesn’t seem that controversial?
By em-bee 2026-02-141:41 the account was taken over by a bot. see the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998432
Interesting, but how's it work out when people believe in "alternative facts"? That seems to be a pretty big problem in many places.
I think I can find some common ground with people who have different views on corporate taxation if we both go over some data and economics and think about it and consider various tradeoffs. Especially if we chat face to face to avoid any 'keyboard warrior' effects.
I probably can't find much common ground with people that believe that condensed water vapor formed by the passage of airplanes is actually a mind control device from the planet Zargon.
IIUC, this was a finding when they ran the Polis experiments in Taiwan: when you map the arguments of the different sides, there are actually large areas of agreement. In other words, the median person who disagrees with you is a "potential common ground" guy, not a "planet Zargon" guy.
What I don't understand about Polis though is who is creating these less biased polls full of unbiased positions that people can vote on? It takes a lot of intelligence and wisdom to even formulate a question that isn't tainted by layers and layers of political innuendo. You can't just put something like "Do you believe in the rights of the unborn child?" into a system like this and expect quality outcomes.
I guess the theory is that you put the entire spectrum of positions on the line which allows fully biased positions on each end to exist. Then biased people on both ends will vote on slightly less and less biased positions that they still agree with and you'll see the true shared positions. But I still think that if you don't have a perfectly equal number of positions to vote on for each side you'll end up with the same problem we already have in society, people are being given biased questions not necessarily by strength but by amount. Therefore they will subconsciously and consciously conclude that the world wants them to be more towards the position that had more questions presented.
By patrickmay 2026-02-1315:291 reply Many (most?) issues don't fit on a single dimension. Using your example, people hold positions that include "Absolutely!", "Yes, but also the rights of the mother.", "Yes, but I won't impose my beliefs on others.", "No, but I don't think people who feel otherwise should be forced to pay for abortions through taxes.", and many others.
In addition to the problem with biased questions you note, there are often built in assumptions that make yes or no responses impossible.
By Nathanba 2026-02-1912:12 it's far worse than that, people don't even agree on the definition of words. In this example what a 'child' is.
By protocolture 2026-02-130:231 reply I find that the median person who disagrees with me, actually agrees with me, but I accidentally triggered their social media PTSD and they flagged me as an enemy because I didnt slavishly polish their preferred set of boots.
By Nathanba 2026-02-137:39 That too is a major problem, in theory you could be posing fine questions but they are already politically or socially tainted so it's game over before it even started, you will get zero actual new thought from the person you asked.
By notahacker 2026-02-1310:21 Trouble is, the "large areas of agreement" can be pretty superficial. You can probably find broad agreement across the entire political spectrum about "cutting government waste", but it turns out that who is tasked with doing this and the low level details of what gets cut matter a lot more than the basic principle.
By mejutoco 2026-02-1311:17 > how's it work out when people believe in "alternative facts"?
People are free to believe what they want but when a platform is overrun with bots spewing this 24/7 (reddit, for example) we are giving a platform to those lies/falsehoods.
IMO that is the issue, we should make it difficult for those lies to spread, but the incentives are not aligned with engagement. If the platform provides measures to disincentivise spam, hate spread with low-effort there will be less of it. Just like spam. And less people tricked because of it.
By reliabilityguy 2026-02-1221:192 reply > Interesting, but how's it work out when people believe in "alternative facts"?
I think the first step is always to separate a fact (I.e., X happened), from why did X happen. Afterwards, you move towards the steps that could prevent X from happening, or reactive protocols to X that minimize the chance of conspiracy theories, etc.
Of course it will not work with all, but, in my opinion, with enough of “alternative facts” lovers that it will be sufficient.
I go over the four ways to disagree with someone on my blog, but the question is, when is it material? If I think the sun revolves around the Earth, unless I'm the navigator of the ship you're on, and my wrong beliefs are going to ship wreck all of us, how does it affect you?
By whattheheckheck 2026-02-1521:25 There's a cognitive cost in the readers mind to have to deal with the fact that someone out in the world has that belief. To me it updates my mind and mental model of the people in the world. So to me I think its material as soon as its recorded and perceived by another mind
I don't understand "why did X happen?" presupposes X happened. We seem to be at the level of X pretty obviously did not happen but people believe it did.
By reliabilityguy 2026-02-1222:55 Ah, I see what you mean. I my personal experience, those that believe in “alternative facts” typically believe in different narratives around the same thing and confuse the narrative with the fact.
For things that did not happen? Yeah. I am not sure there is something that can be done beyond pointing out inconsistencies in their reasoning and proves. However, typically, those things are about believes that mascaras as rational reasoning, and there is nothing you can do about beliefs.
Remember, after WW2 there were people in Germany who did not believe the Allies that Hitler and Co did terrible things.
Thirty years ago I was enthusiastic about what we now call liquid democracy. Elders, to whom I spoke that lived through WWII, saw dynamic+direct democracy as extremely dangerous. I now share their opinion.
To have a healthy world, we need to start with democratic engagement on every block, of every district in every city, in all counties of every province, in all nations across every continent of our shared planet. Critically, it must be completely human mediated, even if it is daily effort for most people everywhere. This is how we must spend our "great AI productivity boost".
I am responding to nested comments; this is not meant to diminish the importance of the linked effort.
What is the underlying problem and what are the potential solutions?
> saw dynamic+direct democracy as extremely dangerous
Are you saying that humans, on average, are bad/harmful/evil? Or that they commit to decisions without thinking them through and act on emotions instead of reason?
Because if the first, then making democracy indirect or otherwise limited should not help.
So I believe it is the second. Then the question becomes either how to get people to vote more rationally or how to weight votes by rationality. The second options is not well explored.
The principal danger is the concentration of power. We should start by rejuvenating and supporting local communities and institutions, interpersonal human connections with primacy. Bottom up governance seems critical, it is where political discussion (with real examples) might happen without becoming a spectacle of identity.
> The principal danger is the concentration of power.
Absolutely. Good people can cooperate or reach compromises for mutual benefit. Bad people are each in it for himself - while they do form alliances sometimes, ultimately working together is unnatural for them and often temporary.
Requiring any position of power to be always distributed among many people obviously makes it hard for a single person to abuse power but less obviously disadvantages bad people by its very nature on a deeper level.
> local communities and institutions
I have an idea which I for now call consent-based society. I need to think about it a lot more but for now:
People talk about rights and freedoms but can't decide where the rights of one person end and another person's begin. If we focus on consent, it may become simpler. People could then form larger and larger groups based on agreement (consent) to rules - a house, small village, city, state. But only as long as it benefits them - consent can be revoked at any time.
But of course, historically, nation states emerged because large hierarchical power structures are advantageous at war and it'll take a long time to get people away from considering them natural, correct or inevitable.
---
Anyway, I don't think your post really answers my question though. From what I read, liquid democracy seems like a form of bottom up governance.
I'm curious to hear more of this "Informed Consent" based framework. I think disclosure of potential negative outcomes from a decision would help.
My concern with liquid democracy is about speed and predictability. Politics involves human relationships, traditions, compromises, etc. I'm worried rapidly switching would further erode local rule and undermine bottom up democracy. Recall referendum/elections seems to work well enough, they create a newsworthy topic so people may have time to absorb and adjust.
Regarding your question. Human behavior seems more a function of circumstances; trying on someone else's shoes can be heartbreaking, so it's often rationale to look the other way. Emotional decisions must be acceptable in a democracy: who am I to decide if someone else is being rational?
For the US, we could start by dramatically expanding the house of representatives so races become more about local human connection rather than party identity. The Senate seems immovable architectural debt, however, its role to buffer sudden change seems important.
> I'm curious to hear more of this "Informed Consent" based framework. I think disclosure of potential negative outcomes from a decision would help.
Maybe I was too optimistic. Instead of deciding who has what rights, we have to decide what requires consent and what does not.
Currently, in most legal systems, using any physical property of a person requires their consent - even if it just means walking about a plot of land they own without harming or devaluing it in any way. I want this to extend to intellectual property - if someone wants to build in top of my work, they should require my consent. This is partially motivated by 10 years of my work being effectively stolen by "AI" companies without any compensation for me.
There's still the issue that for example parody (or other examples or "fair use") is building on top of the original work but should probably be allowed. And that a lot of work is performed by groups - do you need consent from all of them or just more than half?
But I think it can be solved, it just needs more thought.
Maybe consent would end up as just a reframing of the current system but it can still be useful if it forced people to take different perspectives.
For example every salary negotiation is to some extent exploitative because the parties don't have equal information nor equal bargaining power. And a lot of people (ancaps especially) will try to keep denying this. Likening this to consent in sex can force them to either admit there's a massive power differential (and that we should try to reduce it) or claim power differentials are not an issue in sex either (and face the social challenges of defending that opinion).
> Emotional decisions must be acceptable in a democracy: who am I to decide if someone else is being rational?
Maybe emotional was not a good phrase. What I have a massive issue with is people reacting to events and looking (voting) for the easiest solutions without considering their downstream effects.
There's also the fact politicians just lie without repercussions and people don't vote based on an objective reality but based on their impression which is based on what they hear.
How to solve that? As elitist as it sounds, I'd like to see a system where smarter people have a stronger vote. How much stronger? Idk. What is smarter? It could be raw intelligence, or knowledge of the subject matter or better skill at detecting lies and manipulation or a combination of those. It's hard but it should be talked about.
I choose to think our current political challenges are human nature and historic, but increasingly unmoored by modern social isolation and addictive media without the dampening love (and healthy stress) of community. Ubiquitous estrangement within families is tragic; poignantly, the recent TX home death of a UK daughter by her father raised few eyebrows, let alone atonement or a societal reckoning. The prevalence of school shootings are another modern symptom. This runs very deep, there have been legal restrictions against extended households for decades, contractions of public spaces (libraries, malls) and barriers to community environments. We don't connect with neighbors let alone strangers: Amazon delivers to the doorstep. Now we even have AI "friends" trained by far off people with maligned incentives as our closest companions. We have forgotten how to cooperate. This isolation is toxic to the soul, it cannot and will not end well.
We urgently need 180° pivot, towards vibrant human-centered community centers and surrounding commercial districts within a few short blocks or a few minute gratis bus ride. This isn't luddite -- modern technology needs to support a human world, not the inverse. These centers must become the foundation of a renewed civics and democratic revival.
Technology is a necessary scaffolding for a modern, human-centered revival, especially with communication, logistics, transportation, and certainly democratic deliberation. Even so, universal participation in a slow-moving and bottom-up representative government with anonymous paper ballots is essential to restore the consent of the governed and relative peace.
By martin-t 2026-02-161:28 > unmoored by modern social isolation and addictive media without the dampening love (and healthy stress) of community.
You have a point about community but I think for different reasons.
Historically, most communities were created by randomness - closeness by physical proximity, childhood friend of a childhood friend, etc. Today many communities emerge around a common topic or interest and it leads to echo chambers. People used to be around people with different opinions and they had to accept that because for 20 people there were 15 opinions and no side got the upper hand. Now you have 20 people with 2 opinions split roughly 80:20 and the 20 are afraid to say anything for fear of being ostracized. (Numbers pulled out of my ass.)
And another reason is the lost of not just anonymity but also plausible deniability. You say something offline, 5 people hear it and you can judge their reaction, whether to go on or better keep your mouth shut. And of course they can pass on that you said it but with each step, the claim loses credibility and becomes gossip. Now you say something online, it's there forever. Even if you can delete the message, 5k people say it and there's always this one asshole who takes screenshots so even if you change your mind later, he can and will use them against you. (And don't let me get started how screenshot aren't links so even if you clarified you position later, he effectively takes it out of context in a way that he has the final word and you don't even know about it.)
A few weeks ago, I had a shower thought: A social network where LLM-generated or other people's posts get your name assigned to them randomly from time to time. So that 1) people are used to seeing random crazy shit said by you (any everyone else) and not taking it seriously 2) when you actually say something you want to take back, you can just claim it's one of those posts you didn't actually write. It's a stupid idea but I'd also like to see it tried to make sure it's stupid...
That being said, I have been thinking about a social network with multidimensional voting and a network of trust more seriously. One effect would be that posts from people you know personally would be assigned a much higher weight and it might lead to restoring bottom up communities you talk about.
Anyway, I agree with a lot of what you say but don't have much to add.
Please be do careful about elitism. It's one thing to rely upon expert testimony or administrative roles, its quite another to assert a technocratic leadership.
In a human-centered world, people know and generally trust their local family doctor, for example, not carefully forged media personalities.
I am not even sure what technocratic leadership means.
For one, I don't believe people should need to be led. Being led makes sense when quick decisions are more important than optimal decisions, such as in war. Other times, people should be free to lead their lives as they wish.
Another thing: experts can explain their opinions. I cringe every time I see a political discussion without a white board, diagrams, graphs and tables. It's just empty words them. If a politician thinks his decision is a good way to reach a goal, he should first state that goal, then discuss why his solution leads to it, what side effects it has and what alternatives there are. But the general public is partially incapable of this level of sophistication and partially disinterested.
The single most important thing I learned last year is "you can't make people care". It was from a talk about (I think) software freedoms, I haven't even watched the rest of the video, maybe it's one of the 893 videos I have bookmarked to watch later, but it made something click - as if I suddenly gained words to describe how I felt for years.
The reality of politics is that most people don't care about most things but their vote ends up influencing them anyway. I'd like elections/voting to be split into sufficient granularity that people only end up voting about the stuff they care about.
Finally, I don't think elitism is bad when it's justified. If somebody spends 50 hours researching who/what to vote for and another person spends 1 hour watching a political discussion while making dinner, their votes shouldn't have the same weight. IMO the only controversial part is how to measure that in a way that cannot be gamed or abused.
It was a lovely discussion and made consider other approaches, thank you. Sadly, I’m must leave the conversation now. I’m very ill these past few years and am unlikely to recover.
I suggest reading Elinor Ostrom’s book, Governing the Commons. It describes fundamentals of successful cooperative organization. Specifically, successful cooperatives don’t grow bigger, they replicate bright spots while staying local and small, using umbrella organizations to coordinate similar or intertwined activities. This seems much more aligned with historical, decentralized hacker values. Ostrom describes democratic and expressly voluntary ways of organizing inherently monopolistic economic activity. For some industries, those with overwhelming network effects, I think it provides a model that is neither privately held nor government controlled, and when collaborative and nested, a workable decentralization.
By martin-t 2026-02-181:42 Sorry to hear that.
I added it to me to-read list.
And yes, I do also think scaling is the biggest challenge in bottom up / democratic / cooperative organizations, but I think their critics overstate it. Democratic states might be dysfunctional on many levels but they do function enough to not fall apart, mostly. Anyway, I guess I'll know more when I get to the book, thanks.
By JanisErdmanis 2026-02-149:37 In essence liquid democracy makes votes a transferable currency bringing it fairly close to what money already is. It would be really hard to prevent existence of an exchange rate between money and vote transfer making that a capitalist dream (until markets themselves gets monopolized).
I'm of a similar mindset... pure/liquid democracy is literally rule by mob. It can only amplify choices made by feeling over substance.
As an ideal, I've always favored a libertarian mindset... my freedom should extend so far as it doesn't impede on another's rights. Which is a really broad interpretation... I think the further we allow govt to get away from that, the worse things get over time. Freedom is important.
> I'm of a similar mindset... pure/liquid democracy is literally rule by mob.
Rule by people is literally rule by derogatory term for people? The “literally” seems to suggest that this is supposed to communicate more than a personal feeling towards a subject. And yet.
If the majority of people think it's okay to kill off a specific subset of society, does that actually make it okay/good?
Worked up mobs make horrible decisions.
If some moneyed elites as well as associates that are high up in culture, science and similar decide to make a network based on enslavement, child molestation, human trafficking, rape, and torture, does that make it okay/good? Oh wait, that already actually happened.
Are you claiming that was a good thing? Your argument doesn't make any sense in the context given.
My entire point is some things are absolutely wrong, even if a majority of people would support it. Your point above does nothing to counter that argument.
By keybored 2026-02-2320:12 The contrast is a between thing that really happened with a (so far) hypothetical.
