Karma as an e-democracy tool
Representative democracy in the world today suffers from many problems. One of them is the incompatibility of many politicians with the positions they hold and the inability of the common man to influence decisions made on a national or global scale. Many decisions are worked out behind the scenes of public policy, laws are passed in favor of moneybags lobbyists, the interests of the common man are most often ignored.
Direct e-democracy seems like a great way to get rid of these problems. Each person can influence both the development of laws and the adoption of some important decisions. Every vote can be counted.
There is only one problem. Probably it is not a secret for anybody that 70-80-90% of any society consists of narrow-minded people who are inexperienced in political matters, who do not always clearly see what they want and who are incapable of thinking in the interests of the whole society.
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Is it important to listen to this group of people? Certainly yes. Should their opinion be as meaningful as the opinion of a wiser part of society that cares about the interests of the majority? Not. Definitely, we need to differentiate the influence on decision-making of those whose opinion is more authoritative.
How to measure the credibility of a person?
On Habré there is a wonderful parameter that measures the authoritativeness of one or another author - karma . Within the site, he determines the value, the usefulness of this person to the site.
It would be great to make this option universal for the entire Internet. So that each Internet user has a certain numerical rating of his credibility, the importance of his opinion, the degree of his influence.
Unfortunately, nowadays, user authority rating meters are used in few places. In addition, while unified authorization is independent, it is independent of the site. Therefore, to track the activity of a person between sites is problematic.
It would be good to have a single Internet resource that provides universal authorization within the Internet, as well as taking into account the activity of each user on the Internet and taking into account the assessment of his activity by other users. Those. if a person on different sites leaves valuable comments that are regularly added, then the person’s karma will be high.
Then this parameter can be used when making decisions in the system of e-democracy, e-parliament, e-government. The weight of each person’s voice in this case will not be equal to 1, but to the weight of his karma. He who has a higher karma will have a stronger influence on society than he who has a lower karma.
Of course, you need to provide adequate security measures. It is necessary to protect oneself from targeted cheatings of karma, to secure the very system of accounting for karma from outside interference. We need some kind of public control over the calculation of this parameter. It is also desirable to ensure the anonymity of each user, despite the centralized authorization system.
Thus, we will be able to develop more reasonable decisions of any scale, taken in the interests of the majority of the society and really take into account the opinion of each person. And it will be much closer to the concept of “real democracy” than what we have today.
PS This universal meter of karma could be useful not only in the system of e-democracy, but also in other cases. It is no secret that most of the information on the Internet today is rubbish, and a significant part of users are trolls, flooders, and inadequate. Universal karma would help various information resources to pre-filter adequate users from everyone else, which would definitely increase the amount of quality information on the Internet.
PPS I’ll clarify that Habr's karma in this case is used as an example and is not an ideal role model for choosing an authority assessment algorithm within the framework of this idea.
Direct e-democracy seems like a great way to get rid of these problems. Each person can influence both the development of laws and the adoption of some important decisions. Every vote can be counted.
There is only one problem. Probably it is not a secret for anybody that 70-80-90% of any society consists of narrow-minded people who are inexperienced in political matters, who do not always clearly see what they want and who are incapable of thinking in the interests of the whole society.
')
Is it important to listen to this group of people? Certainly yes. Should their opinion be as meaningful as the opinion of a wiser part of society that cares about the interests of the majority? Not. Definitely, we need to differentiate the influence on decision-making of those whose opinion is more authoritative.
How to measure the credibility of a person?
On Habré there is a wonderful parameter that measures the authoritativeness of one or another author - karma . Within the site, he determines the value, the usefulness of this person to the site.
It would be great to make this option universal for the entire Internet. So that each Internet user has a certain numerical rating of his credibility, the importance of his opinion, the degree of his influence.
Unfortunately, nowadays, user authority rating meters are used in few places. In addition, while unified authorization is independent, it is independent of the site. Therefore, to track the activity of a person between sites is problematic.
It would be good to have a single Internet resource that provides universal authorization within the Internet, as well as taking into account the activity of each user on the Internet and taking into account the assessment of his activity by other users. Those. if a person on different sites leaves valuable comments that are regularly added, then the person’s karma will be high.
Then this parameter can be used when making decisions in the system of e-democracy, e-parliament, e-government. The weight of each person’s voice in this case will not be equal to 1, but to the weight of his karma. He who has a higher karma will have a stronger influence on society than he who has a lower karma.
Of course, you need to provide adequate security measures. It is necessary to protect oneself from targeted cheatings of karma, to secure the very system of accounting for karma from outside interference. We need some kind of public control over the calculation of this parameter. It is also desirable to ensure the anonymity of each user, despite the centralized authorization system.
Thus, we will be able to develop more reasonable decisions of any scale, taken in the interests of the majority of the society and really take into account the opinion of each person. And it will be much closer to the concept of “real democracy” than what we have today.
PS This universal meter of karma could be useful not only in the system of e-democracy, but also in other cases. It is no secret that most of the information on the Internet today is rubbish, and a significant part of users are trolls, flooders, and inadequate. Universal karma would help various information resources to pre-filter adequate users from everyone else, which would definitely increase the amount of quality information on the Internet.
PPS I’ll clarify that Habr's karma in this case is used as an example and is not an ideal role model for choosing an authority assessment algorithm within the framework of this idea.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/121947/
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