I'm not from this instance but I'd caution heavily against letting an instance with open signups in a fediverse with a bot problem be 'self-governing'.

[–] Difficult_Bit_1339@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We're not just running polls and blindly following the results. I think the the goal of having a community discussion place is to help identify the people who are actively trying to participate in the process and then take their views into account in deciding the future of things.

Ultimately, like all instances this is functionally a dictatorship because @TheDude runs the server and has the ultimate say in everything. He's created an area where people can voice their opinions and his intentions appear to be to parse the discussion and make an informed decision based on the results.

I doubt he'd be fooled by some position suddenly having 2500 bot comments saying 'Nay'.

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I just briefly looked at an agora post and it seems like that's exactly what's happening: lots of "Aye" with no discussion. Scrolling through more, people seem to be using upvotes/downvotes for voting.

By all means if you have a system in place to handle bots that have access to chatGPT then don't mind me, I'm just saying that bots should be taken into account lest humans get outvoted.

[–] Difficult_Bit_1339@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago

It's not an easy problem to solve and I agree that it has the potential to become a large problem going forward (LLMs make the bot problem even more difficult to deal with).

I've no idea how TheDude decides what opinion to follow but, so far, he's piloted the instance as well as anyone could expect so I'm willing to keep riding along to see where things go.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

You specifically pulled up a [vote] post where that is the point. Try reading a [discussion] post.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are votingg threads and discussion. lemmy doesn't have a flair system.