Karma as an instrument of e-democracy
Representative democracy in the world today suffers from many problems. One of them is the inconsistency of many politicians with their posts and the inability of a simple person to influence decisions made on a national or global scale. Many decisions are made behind the scenes of public policy, laws are adopted to please the money-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. Everyone can influence both the development of laws and the adoption of some important decisions. Each vote can be counted.
There is only one problem. It is probably not a secret for anyone that 70-80-90% of any society consists of foolish people, inexperienced in political issues, who do not always have a clear idea of exactly what they want and are unable to think in the interests of the whole society.
Is it important to listen to the opinion of this group of people? Absolutely yes. Should their opinion be as significant as the opinion of the wiser part of society, caring for the interests of the majority? Not. It is clear that we must differentiate the impact on decision-making of those whose opinion is more authoritative.
How to measure the authority of a person?
On Habré there is a wonderful parameter that measures the authority of a particular author - karma. Within the site, it determines the value, usefulness of a given person for 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 authority, the importance of his opinion, the degree of his influence.
Unfortunately, today there are few places where users are rated. In addition, a single authorization independent of the site is still poorly distributed. Therefore, tracking the activity of a person between sites is problematic.
It would be nice 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 various 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 be not 1, but the weight of his karma. One who has higher karma will have a stronger influence on society than others than one who has lower karma.
Of course, appropriate security measures must be ensured. It is necessary to protect oneself from targeted karma cheats, to secure the karma accounting system itself 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 a centralized authorization system.
Thus, we will be able to develop more reasonable decisions of any scale, taken in the interests of most of 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 karma meter 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 garbage, and a significant part of users are trolls, flooders and inadequate ones. Universal karma would help various information resources pre-filter adequate users from everyone else, which would definitely increase the amount of quality information on the Internet.
PPS I’ll clarify, Habr’s karma in this case is used as an example and is not an ideal role model when choosing an algorithm for assessing credibility in the framework of this idea.
Direct e-democracy seems like a great way to get rid of these problems. Everyone can influence both the development of laws and the adoption of some important decisions. Each vote can be counted.
There is only one problem. It is probably not a secret for anyone that 70-80-90% of any society consists of foolish people, inexperienced in political issues, who do not always have a clear idea of exactly what they want and are unable to think in the interests of the whole society.
Is it important to listen to the opinion of this group of people? Absolutely yes. Should their opinion be as significant as the opinion of the wiser part of society, caring for the interests of the majority? Not. It is clear that we must differentiate the impact on decision-making of those whose opinion is more authoritative.
How to measure the authority of a person?
On Habré there is a wonderful parameter that measures the authority of a particular author - karma. Within the site, it determines the value, usefulness of a given person for 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 authority, the importance of his opinion, the degree of his influence.
Unfortunately, today there are few places where users are rated. In addition, a single authorization independent of the site is still poorly distributed. Therefore, tracking the activity of a person between sites is problematic.
It would be nice 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 various 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 be not 1, but the weight of his karma. One who has higher karma will have a stronger influence on society than others than one who has lower karma.
Of course, appropriate security measures must be ensured. It is necessary to protect oneself from targeted karma cheats, to secure the karma accounting system itself 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 a centralized authorization system.
Thus, we will be able to develop more reasonable decisions of any scale, taken in the interests of most of 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 karma meter 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 garbage, and a significant part of users are trolls, flooders and inadequate ones. Universal karma would help various information resources pre-filter adequate users from everyone else, which would definitely increase the amount of quality information on the Internet.
PPS I’ll clarify, Habr’s karma in this case is used as an example and is not an ideal role model when choosing an algorithm for assessing credibility in the framework of this idea.