First, it is always important to remember that representative democracy has known fundamental scaling problems from a game-theoretic perspective, and we can enjoy the consequences globally across the developed world today. Establishments and incumbents getting back to old good populism and enforcement, no matter left, right, or center. Representation works as a bootstrap mechanism, but it should be treated as something to be transformed into efficient direct democracy, otherwise we are doomed. And here we come to the practical "efficiency" of governing local communities. It seems especially important to discuss possible solutions here on HN, because much of the solution space clearly lies in tech.
So all in all, small communities do not fail because online participation is impossible. They fail because obstruction is cheap and accountability is absent: one person can repeatedly delay a decision, while everyone who supported a controversial decision simply moves on.
I think we are in that point in history where participation could be dramatically improved by LLM in pipeline (and there are real works behind it
https://github.com/AIObjectives/tttc-light-jshttps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq2852)
- Chat and voice messages becomes a source-linked with signed summaries (llm definitely can help most ppl structure their thoughts into words)
- disputes are classified as factual, distributive, value-based, procedural, or rights-related
- it becomes more real to agree on explicit success (or dealbreaking) criteria for every decision
- votes and objections also accounted as "prediction market" bets of their voting power.
- evidence is more reviewable with LLM
- and what's most important the outcome updates domain-specific reputation that weakens future vote weights of those who sabotaged, or joined to crowd for populist decisions proved to be failure.
If a blinded LLM assessment and the community votes agree, the decision proceeds. If they disagree, at least it is much rare occasion and interesting to consider the causes.
The key innovation is an auditable path from messy discussion to decisions, evidence, outcomes, and consequences. Reputation becomes the non-monetary cost of being confidently wrong or strategically obstructive.
I hope to see more of such platforms and survive experiments. Current situation feels like desperation
No way API access to current socials, they are all doomed. Bluesky/ATProto developments seems to be the best hope and basis today to rebuild and get back to users what is and always was theirs.
Lobbyists do not sleep. It's easy to recall how those two, especially apple, tried to sabotage FIDO2 trying to capture webauthn standards, fortunately failed.
EU also has to learn their inside traitors who sabotage their great efforts in decentralization of identity, and learn to avoid those incredible situations like happens right now with chat control directly lobbied by silicon valley surveillance vendors
The reason is that Google are highly commercialized first on thier maps, while Apple focused on major markets. E.g. I can remember the times like 2017, when Apple maps was as rocky as possible, but they were working fine in Shenzhen with matching chines to transcriptions, while Google maps sucked at scale there.
Haha, can't be said better. M1pro is so good. Literally the only Jobs legacy, every other thing except silicon and laptop engineering is mediocre to dead now.
I think it’s opposite. The general population always has nothing with outstanding engineers thru the history. It’s hard to say that VC bubbles of recent decades really drove the amount of outstanding engineers, it’s just an overall increase of prosperity, while hot capital in addition incentivesed quite terrible ways to get rich quick, effectively balancing back this freshly activated dev capital. So now ai takes back monopoly on dev capital from bigbiz, and general youth population is weird like it always has been, but in reality doing less drink/smoke/drugs, and sometimes their values are better than ours, just need some more time to polish. I think we are not doomed.
> A coalition of 16 banks thinks it has the answer.
Oh! That's exactly what we all needed - 16 banks suggest their own "system", even more crude and clumsy imitation of the surveillance standards of payment systems and marketplaces, which shielded banks from snitching clients' consumption patterns.
They don't need anything advanced like Apple Pay layered tokenizations that at least respects a little of privacy. Everything is linked to a single phone (the article states that the focus is on Bizum and those pathetic peer-to-peer payment systems). The banks are in good shape to capture data, the tax authorities have a clear picture of how to squeeze the plebs even more - nice.
How about stablecoins with native yield from ECB treasuries? It solves everything and costs nothing. But we see what happens in US - "treasuries spread is not for plebs", - banks say.
So all in all, small communities do not fail because online participation is impossible. They fail because obstruction is cheap and accountability is absent: one person can repeatedly delay a decision, while everyone who supported a controversial decision simply moves on. I think we are in that point in history where participation could be dramatically improved by LLM in pipeline (and there are real works behind it https://github.com/AIObjectives/tttc-light-js https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq2852)
- Chat and voice messages becomes a source-linked with signed summaries (llm definitely can help most ppl structure their thoughts into words)
- disputes are classified as factual, distributive, value-based, procedural, or rights-related
- it becomes more real to agree on explicit success (or dealbreaking) criteria for every decision
- votes and objections also accounted as "prediction market" bets of their voting power.
- evidence is more reviewable with LLM
- and what's most important the outcome updates domain-specific reputation that weakens future vote weights of those who sabotaged, or joined to crowd for populist decisions proved to be failure.
If a blinded LLM assessment and the community votes agree, the decision proceeds. If they disagree, at least it is much rare occasion and interesting to consider the causes. The key innovation is an auditable path from messy discussion to decisions, evidence, outcomes, and consequences. Reputation becomes the non-monetary cost of being confidently wrong or strategically obstructive. I hope to see more of such platforms and survive experiments. Current situation feels like desperation
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