I believe we need dedicated spaces for political discussion that are not based on algorithms optimized for engagement (aka outrage). Lemmy has the advantage that the algorithms ordering content are pretty easy to understand and are not driven by the profit incentives that require maximizing user engagement over all else.
In my opinion, Lemmy lacks two things to facilitate being this public square today. The first is a way to limit bots or bad actors from participating in discussions. To my knowledge the bot problem has not been solved on this platform. (Please correct me if I’m wrong). The second is that some of the people who need to participate in these discussions aren’t on Lemmy.
I believe both of these issues could be fixed by governments hosting their own instances and requiring identification from that country to participate on the platform. An ‘official’ place for representatives and constituents to converse should resolve second issue. I think just a few key people actively participating in discussions would be enough to start this transituon. The ID will make many people nervous, and we should be wary of ways in which governments could abuse this power. I don’t know of a better way to reduce bot influence on public discussions though.
This next bit is American specific (sorry). Having the government host the instance would make it subject to the first amendment, so it should be difficult to silence views through moderation if the constitution still means anything. Even though SCOTUS seems to ignore it, I believe it’s in our best interest to act as if the constitution still works the way we want it to. To act otherwise is to concede its power.
No. No, man. Shit no, man! I believe you’d get your ass raided by ice doin’ something like that, man.
Nice try FBI…
Maybe.
An official government forum where politicians engage with the people they represent, provide reasoning for their votes, and actually listen to what members of the public want would be great. There’s a case for using verified real names in such a forum.
A place where internet randoms yell at each other about politics, on the other hand would probably not be improved by identity checks.
That sounds like an awful idea lmao. I would never.
ID requirement is terrible for everyone but that especially seems like you’re limiting this to citizens or at least people who have managed to get appropriate immigration documents, which is a difficult and obstructive process that many migrants haven’t got yet. Plus a lot of countries make it hard to get ID without a fixed address.
I believe we need dedicated spaces for political discussion that are not based on algorithms optimized for engagement (aka outrage).
So do we, which is one of the reasons why Lemmy was created, and why Lemmy does not have algorithms for rage engagement. Lemmy is all cost and no revenue, so there is no financial incentive for it to “maximize ‘engagement.’”
The first is a way to limit bots or bad actors from participating in discussions.
Where are the actually-existing the “bot problems” on Lemmy? While it could happen, I don’t think it actually is happening to any significant extent presently.
I also don’t get the impression there is a large bot presence here today. I do think if the platform was used as a normal communication network between constituient and representative it would probably become a target for foreign and domestic bots.
only ones I see are the plethora of onlyfans posts by what I presume is some Russian dude stealing photos or paying women for photo’s
I want no media nor communication directly ran by the government
It is the responsibility of every other instance to defederate from them.
My government originated chat control. Not a chance.
That said, I definitely think the government should get the fuck away from twitter and host their own mastodon for official communication if they think updating a website is too much work.
Of fucking course not.
I wouldn’t make my worst enemies use it
This would just end up being Facebook in the long run.
I don’t think so. The main reason Facebook is so bad is it’s engagement algorithm. It is designed to maximize user engagement to sell adds, and it does that by putting outrage inspiring posts in front of users so that they have an emotional response and stay engaged. Using a human voting system instead of an outrage algorithm to determine what content people is exactly why I enjoy this platform over the other social media platforms.
Is there still rage bait here? Of course! Is it systematically shoved down your throat? No.
One thing that would be nice is if we can know that we’re actually talking to people from the same country as us and that the different accounts represent different people. But I think something like a web of trust is preferable for that purpose.
I’m not familiar with web of trust. What does that mean?
Web of Trust in this context would be if you mark people you personally know as trusted because you know they’re real people, and they also mark people they know, and so on. If a stranger is trusted by someone your trust, then you also indirectly trust them. This indirect trust can occur over two links as described or more. With enough people vouching for each other, you can eventually get a web that covers the whole country.
Has this shown to be effective at stopping bots? It seems like you’d just be a few bad actors to ruin the system
I don’t think its ever been implemented, so probably not. You wouldn’t want to trust everyone the same way independent of their distance in the trust network. It would definitely be easy to exploit if you did with just a single bad actor and one gullible person. It might even be valuable to assign different weights to each of your direct trust connections.
