We seem to share similar ideas. I think we don’t necessarily have to be constrained by how stuff works in the real world. There, it is impossible to listen to everyone, you need to transfer power to a small amount of representatives. And one or few people at the top or it gets messy and nothing gets done. Also you need to come up with a single solution that applies to everyone.
I don’t think it has to be that way in the realm of online services. Technically, we can ask an arbitrary number of people for their opinion. Vote with less effort since networks are fast, databases quite capable and everything interconnected anyways. Have people just represent themselves or just 5 family members or transfer their democratic power to whomever they deem appropriate. It doesn’t even have to be a vote by majority. There are better weighted voting systems out there that are just impossible to implement in real-world countries. It doesn’t have to be one solution for everything, it could individually apply to communities of the platform or work differently for different topics. And big platforms already provide different content and algorithms for their individual users. We could also just everyone be provided with a unique perspective on the same data. Someone can be faced with something while another person has it buried at the bottom or not displayed at all. And we’d just choose things for ourselves, not vote on how other people are treated at all. (I mean that somehow emerges on it’s own… Once everyone chooses to not listen to trolls and annoying people, they’d just lose their audience and become meaningless.)
I see many technical challenges and negative consequences. We’d need to keep the crypto and blockchain people away from it. Everything I’ve seen that uses blockchain technology to achieve this has failed in the meantime. And was mainly intended to make money by some means. But things like ActivityPub are also not made for this. I’d really like to do away with the current voting mechanisms. I’d rather say I trust what this person says and my interests align with those people and this would replace global up- and downvoting. It’s certainly possible from a technical viewpoint. But would it really encourage good behaviour and foster a nice place? People sometimes like to engage especially with the things they oppose and comment on them. It would also be a massive filter-bubble. Algorithms confine people into small and similar-minded bubbles, not a diverse and realistic and stimulating world. I think it’s really difficult to find a delicate balance here, design choices that automatically push towards good behaviour and interesting engagement per default.
I completely agree on the admin stuff. Someone has to provide the computing power and take responsibility for what’s stored on their servers. And sometimes mistakes happen, things turn out bad or break. There are malicious people out there. Someone needs to have the power to fix things. I think that’s perfectly possible. Lots of platforms have succeded at that, there are people available, perfectly able to handle that responsibility. And ultimately, the whole internet is quite resilient and was designed with the idea of being a level playing-field and connect things and people.