Ahoy me hearties!
We were thinking this might be a good test run topic for instance voting in our !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com community. Please be patient with us if anything breaks or isn’t working properly. Feedback is welcome.
The voting topic
Given the current political backdrop and recent video of Elon Musk performing clearly identifiable Nazi salutes at the Presidential inauguration, some communities have started banning all links to X/Twitter. A couple of examples I noticed yesterday:
The vote is on whether our instance should follow suit and implement an instance-wide ban on X/Twitter links in posts and comments.
I’ve noticed some people suggesting allowing screenshots to still be used (e.g. for memes). Feel free to drop a comment if you have an opinion on that.
How to vote
Simply upvote or downvote this post. The /0 Bot will automatically calculate and update a tally of votes every 15 mins or so according to the voting rules (so don’t expect instant updates). An upvote is counted in favour of the resolution. A downvote is counted as against the resolution.
Note regarding crossposting: please be aware that only votes on the original post in !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com will be counted.
When to vote
Voting starts as of now. We’ll close voting once the flow of votes stops - not sure exactly when that will be yet, but I’d like to keep the topic open for at least 2 or 3 days (maybe a week?) to give everyone a chance to vote.
Who can vote
TLDR here is that anyone can vote, but your votes will be weighted differently depending if you are a financial supporter, local instance member or external instance member.
As discussed in the announcement post, the initial plan was that only stakeholders can vote and open threads. That now includes everyone who is supporting us with any monthly donation amount.
Voting rights have also been extended so that votes of other local instance members who otherwise have no voting rights will be accounted at a rate of 1/100 from a random sample of up to 1000 of their votes. This means that a vote can go up to max +/- 10 from local community votes and it’s a fractional count (i.e. +1.1, or -0.7) which should make the local community sentiment an excellent tiebreaker, without overwhelming the people who are directly supporting the instance. Furthermore, I decided to display the “outsider sentiment” which is votes from non-valid-voting users from other instances. The outsider sentiment is only flavour (“Positive”, “Negative” etc) and is disregarded from the total. This is just shown for reference of the outsider sentiment which I think might be useful.
What constitutes a successful vote on a topic?
We are totally open to debate on this. I was thinking for this topic, a 2/3 majority vote would be a good target to aim for so we can be certain the community vote represents a clear majority of our users’ opinions.
My thinking here is that if some topics are split close to 50/50 then achieving a 51% vote for example does not produce a clear mandate and may simply cause unnecessary division.
Having said that, I acknowledge a 2/3 majority is an arbitrary choice, but unless we implement a more complex voting system hopefully it is “good enough” to indicate a clear majority. As mentioned previously, feedback is very welcome and we will review and make adjustments where necessary.
Community participation
I strongly encourage all our instance members as well as subscribers from different instances to vote on this topic. If we only get a small handful of votes it’s not going to be very representative of overall sentiment. This is a test run, so if things don’t work out in terms of participation we will re-assess and perhaps revisit the topic.
Note that while votes from stakeholders have more weight. However each stakeholder (i.e. anyone supporting us and MVPs
) can vouch for 2 others which will also give them a proper vote. Vouching can be done with a special PM to the bot .So If you cannot support the instance financially, but feel you’ve been a valuable member of this instance nonetheless, please leave a comment and hopefully people will vouch for you. If this happens, your votes will be automatically counted on the next bot run.
PS: To see the vote tally, make sure you don’t have @div0@lemmy.dbzer0.com (or all bots) blocked
deleted by creator
Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/flatworm7591
This is a simple majority vote. The current tally is as follows:
- For:
(1), 
(7), 
(6), (3), 
(2), 
(1) - Against:
- Local Community: +2.5
- Outsider sentiment: Positive
- Total: +22.5
- Percentage: 100.00%
This vote will complete in 3 days
Reminder that this is a pilot process and results of voting are not set in stone.
- For:
I would suggest that you set a fixed voting period in the future. This makes the process more transparent. Maybe a week or two in general for each decision. With a proper announcement prior, make a week or three day before coting may start.
I wasn’t sure how many votes we would get for this first vote, so wasn’t sure how long to leave it open for. I left it at the default of 7 days. But we already have a good representative sample of local users. As of today we’ve had 269 local upvotes vs 20 downvotes so there’s really no chance at this stage of a change to the result, especially since we only had a handful of extra votes since yesterday. We also need some agility to make decisions in a reasonable timeframe.
Fortunately though, so long as we have an adequate sample size of our active users then we can be reasonably confident in the results, statistically speaking. But I’d like to make sure everyone who wants to vote gets a chance to vote, so I do like your idea of advanced notice :)
Honestly, links to xitter were annoying even before since it always tried to force me to create an account any time I clicked one. I’m fine with removing all links to anything Musk or Zuckerberg related.
Even more so now that they block you from reading replies/threads nested below the linked post.
tbh I upvoted before reading the whole thing, than took it back. I just want to see the final result without interacting
I’m quite new here (hello everyone!), but I think banning twitter links is in line with the community’s principles, and it shows a level of solidarity with other communities and instances doing the same.
On a more practical note, I feel like there is a good chance if this movement becomes widespread enough, it will get some news coverage, which could increase awareness and help bring like minded individuals (and trolls probably, but I suspect that’s nothing new) to the instance.
This seems like a largely symbolic gesture though, so I don’t have an issue with screenshots.
Really, I think that direct links should’ve been at least heavily discouraged if not banned outright the moment that Vichy Twitter started requiring an active login to follow them.
Now that Musk has dropped the last vestiges of his mask and revealed himself as a nazi, links absolutely should be banned. Nobody here should ever provide that nazi cesspit with even one single click.
The only thing Musk cares about more than imposing his warped vision on the world is money. He needs to be denied both.
Boycotts are one of two real effective ways of killing monopolies. It’s like their kryptonite.
Any boycott against a facist corporate hegemony is a go from me.
Appreciate you and fuck nazis
Allow screenshots. “Important” people post crazy shit there, and it’s nice to keep an eye on them from time to time.
I say allow links because I haven’t noticed them as being too common, so it’s not really a problem? I do avoid clicking on Xitter links though; IIRC they show an annoying login modal, then when you click that off, they only show the post with no context, so they’re not very useful.
I’m for the ban of the links but not the screenshots. Screenshots without links will provide the content without giving an easy way to move the traffic there so it would be a positive change without hurting the activity on lemmy. Banning screenshots would add a lot to the modding workload as well which isn’t great either regardless of if it’s the mods taking care of it or the admins.
Another reason for banning Twitter links: If you aren’t logged in, you can’t actually see the discussion, so the link is useless and basically spam advertising to get a Twitter account. I’ve always been really annoyed seeing Twitter links for this reason and the fact that the platform is garbage in general. Duplicating the content in a screenshot or some other way is a way better option.
Yes, as someone without a xitter account, the links are completely useless. Screenshots are stupid, but I can at least see them.
Fuck any site that requires an account/subscription to view content.
But fuck Elons shitty site the most. Full support for banning links.
Ban the links, allow the screenshots.
Banning screenshots seems like it would both be more difficult, and less relevant to the core issue - ie not giving the chief Nazi any traffic for his propaganda money sink. Especially since there’s over a decade’s worth of twitter screenshots used in memes - would there be a cutoff date Twitter screenshots would be checked for, or would even ancient screenshots be banned? The former seems like a lot of effort for very little payoff, while the latter seems a bit silly.
I’ll add myself to the flood of people agreeing that links should be scrubbed but not screenshots
Consume their content without feeding their ad dollars, fuck em
It’s really not just about the ad dollars. The idea is that even allowing screenshots of Xitter memes, is promoting this as a platform worth participating in.
allowing screenshots of Xitter memes, is promoting this as a platform worth participating in.
Yeah, kind of, but I feel like it clashes with the “information wants to be free” -sentiment. I view it the same as pirating a Disney movie in a sense
I’d add that while I agree with your primary thought there, info should be free, it should also be tempered slightly by “don’t be a dick” in that using Xitter links can be a privacy nightmare.
In that vein, making sure only masked/proxied links I think is more viable.
100% agree with you there, I was only defending screenshots :)
