The flaw is inherent in the design [LWN.net]

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 25, 2009 21:22 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)
Parent article: Digg, Dug, Buried: How Linux news disappears (ComputerWorld)

And this is why I have never been to digg, reddit, etc. I saw the problem from the theory of operation of those sites and didn't bother to participate.

It doesn't just sound like democracy in its most basic form, it IS democracy in action. The problem is we have been conditioned by the media and the government schools to view democracy as an unquestionable good thing. It isn't. The US Founding Fathers understood this and carefully designed us a Republic instead. The pros and cons of pure democracy were well understood and considered terrifying. See the French Revolution for examples of the horrors they foresaw and designed out of the US Constitution.

The problem is the sites are based on pure democracy and thus there is no technical fix possible. Only by admitting the problem can the design be corrected. Keep this in mind when people push democracy as the solution to other problems both online and in meatspace.

On the other hand, as the original article notes, sites like Slashdot have held up fairly well even with massive growth. Still a pretty popular site with thousands of active users at any point in time, fairly simple moderation system. But not a pure democracy and there are clearly editors in the decision loop to keep the S/N ratio usable.

Imagine an open source project with a totally open repo where anyone could commit patches. Would anyone expect anything useful to come from such a project?

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The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 25, 2009 21:57 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

That's "hordes". But the problems of California trace mainly to those laws which specify a 2/3 majority for action. The consequence is that a small minority suffices to forestall action, a thoroughly anti-democratic feature. Passing a budget requires such a majority. Such a minority can extort ridiculous concessions from the majority, such as (in California's case) a yacht-owner's tax credit. (No, not joking.)

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 25, 2009 22:10 UTC (Thu) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

"The downfall of a democracy occurs when the plebs, discovering they can vote themselves bread and circuses, vote themselves bread and circuses." -- Robert A. Heinlein.

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 25, 2009 23:38 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Did you miss the point? It is not the "plebs" who are voting themselves circuses (or, in this case, yachts); it is the ultra-rich, through their control of the aforementioned anti-democratic minority.

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 27, 2009 4:15 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Ha.

You never were taught early democratic history have you? The greeks were the first ones to identify the weaknesses inherent in democracy.

And the biggest weakness is, indeed, it all starts falling appart when the regular folk realize that they can vote themselves raises and are swayed by skillfull polititions who promise to fullfill those desires.

The other major weakness, is of course, a fully democratic nation is easily directed by mass histeria.. that is a country will typically go huge, rather temporary, swings in political opinion that has more to do with emotion then reason. For example: 9/11 or the stock market crash. Then again, skillfull polititions can leverage this temporary lack of reason to rush through laws and garner more power in a short time.

Thats why the USA (with the longest lasting democracy so far) was originally designed with a very weak and ineffectual central government. The designers wanted to have a way to counter the negative effects of democracy and prop up the positive effects. The way it's designed with a 3 branch system is designed to slow things down and make it hard for people to rush through legislation and pass laws.

After 200 years or so those limitations have, unfortunately, been largely forgotten and in the past 30 years people have been happy to give huge amounts of power to the central government for all sorts of lets-get-boogyman-now-before-they-get-us reasons. (economic paranioa, terrorism, war on drugs, environmentalism scare tactics, religous wackiness, its-for-the-children, etc etc)

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 27, 2009 4:18 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

To put it another way:

The 'elites' get their power by promising people those 'plebs' "bread and circuses".

Corporate power is one way, but it's much more limited then the power people obtain through holding high government office. The sort of the people that get the high corporate power and the same sort of people that get high governmental power. Same types, same ambitions.

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 27, 2009 13:20 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Thats why the USA (with the longest lasting democracy so far)

That is extremely debatable (and this is completely off topic but it's Saturday and I'm bored). For the first fifty-plus years the franchise was decidedly limited, so it's questionable to what extent it was more a democracy than, say, Britain, which banned slavery on its shores earlier but had rotten boroughs and very strange voter eligibility criteria to contend with.

I suspect the case of the English Parliament makes it very hard to say what the age of the 'oldest continuous democracy' is, because its democracy was not designed but emerged over a very long period of time. Parliament could perhaps be considered to date back to the witenagemot, which vanishes into the mists of history but has written evidence surviving from the 600s, and was probably an old insitution then. I'm fairly sure that's older than the US, but I'm also fairly sure it wasn't what we'd today call a democracy. When did democracy in England start? Probably sometime in the 12th to 15th centuries, but there wasn't one moment you could point at and say 'here begins democracy', and so you can't say whether England (or its descendant states) or some other nation wins this contest (though it would probably be unfair to disqualify England merely because of temporary disruptions like Cromwell, or on the basis that the Act of Union saw it replaced with the UK Parliament, a body with a similar name, membership, and traditions sitting in the same building). Sorry if this torpedoes your quest for an unambiguous 'oldest' to point to.

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 28, 2009 20:19 UTC (Sun) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

Thats why the USA (with the longest lasting democracy so far)

I hope you are joking. How long have you even had equal rights and votes for all in the US? It wasn't even early by international standards. But democracy in the western sense is a fairly recent invention. It took even longer for all to get the chance for education etc. to actually make use of it. If all that is required is that some people get to vote, democracy in many countries predate even the founding of USA by at least a couple of hundred years.

A modern democracy also requires that more than a few owners control media (fail), that media is not censored (fail) and that the juridical system works with medieval measures such as capital punishment (if the US was a European state this alone would be considered too undemocratic to join the EU).

There are many democratic predictor values that can be used in the political sciences. How different nation states scores at different periods in history makes for some interesting reading.

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 25, 2009 22:34 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

It seems to me that their problem has more to do with requiring a single yes-or-no vote for the entire budget than the 2/3-majority threshold. Any action taken is going to affect everyone, even those who voted against it, so it makes sense for even a small minority to be able to veto actions to which they are opposed. It wouldn't be a problem if the budget was more distributed; for example, short-term, targeted spending could be authorized alongside each bill when and if it passes. For long-term spending the yearly budget could be approved in a similar manner, and a supermajority would only required to increase it. A minority could then block specific marginal programs, but would be unable to hold the majority hostage, as it were.

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 26, 2009 11:31 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

I think you're mismatching democracy and vote. Real democracy would be achieve by consensus, whereas vote always leaves someone unhappy.

Of course, consensus other millions of people might get a bit difficult to reach, so we use voting systems instead...

Analogies between Digg and democracy are flawed

Posted Jun 26, 2009 1:12 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

An important aspect of democracy is the election -- where everyone votes roughly simultaneously -- which limits gamesmanship, including that described in the article. Digg is an ongoing popularity poll, not a democracy.

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 29, 2009 8:53 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]

Our swiss democracy certainly is better (and might be, depending on criteria, even older than the US one), but it's certainly not perfect.

We've got a lot of the same problems as the USA; tough generally in lesser extent, since we've got some more safeguards built in. (Like: A ruling council of 7 people which serves also as cabinet, instead of a president who can choose his own cronies as cabinet).

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jul 2, 2009 11:19 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> The US Founding Fathers understood this and carefully designed us a
> Republic instead. The pros and cons of pure democracy were well understood
> and considered terrifying. See the French Revolution for examples of the
> horrors they foresaw and designed out of the US Constitution.

Not that dead horse again

It is massively dishonest to compare early years of the French and US republics and state the differences were caused by their respective constitutions. The French republic had to contend with multiple hostile vultures (neighbours) all too happy to intervene military, profit from the political upheaval, and settle centuries-old scores (aggravated by European nobility cross-continent alliances and intervention by religious authorities). And in case that was not sufficient, don't forget the revolution started in the first place because people were starved after several years of bad harvests combined with economic crash.

The USA OTOH had help from every English enemy and was an ocean away from its main opponent anyway.

In other circumstances there would have been little blood-letting in France. The king was even unharmed and left in place at first, it took his fleeing abroad (with the intention to return at the head of a foreign army) to radicalise the country.

The same repeated foreign interventions, religious meddling and nobility plotting caused years of bloody religious wars in France a few centuries before, with no revolution involved. It was endemic in Italy for a long time.

So don't get fooled by the anti-Napoleonic propaganda that lingers in the anglo-saxon world. The horrors that occurred in Europe at the end of the 18th century had little to do with political systems and can be explained 120% by the usual clashes between powers with too much influence/wealth/armament/ambition and too little sense.