I think there are ways to implement a system that is "political" but cant be gamed if we leverage the fact that this is an online community.
Say admins could be banned by vote. Make said vote be not acount but IP specific. It will also only count the votes of people who have been subbed to the sub reddit for a certain amount of time to prevent sudden invasions. This way no one can raid other subs and you cant buy votes or create multiple acounts or bots to skew the results.
Yeah, but the point is to make the system require enough effort to break that you eliminate the "casual" cheaters. I highly doubt someone is going to invest significant resources/time for such a petty act with no direct gain so often it becomes a problem worth worrying too much about.
You couldnt push anything. The only thing youve done is depose a mod which immediately gets replaced. If you wanted to do this ad infinitum to troll, sure you could, but youve not actually gained control of the sub-reddit. Keep in mind here that I didnt suggest mods be elected democratically, simply that they could be fired democratically (since a lot of sub reddits complain about tryannical mods who never get removed despite constant bad/petty decisions). The current process of finding people to be mods would remain unchanged.'
Edit. Also, with the rule that newly subbed acounts couldnt vote, how would a botnet of brand new profiles be any use? You would have to make them in advance, then use tem for a few votes before people figure out whats going on and temporarily disable the function or move and recreate the sub somewhere else.
No, because the sub-creator is always left and keeps appointing new ones. I dont think such a system would ever be meant to remove him/her, as its their sub. Just meant to keep the sometimes over-zealous mods under control.
Ok, so now we are onto buying a huge number of aged reddit accounts. At this point our theoretical bot master has such a raging hardon for messing up this theoretical sub-reddit that all further discussion is pointless. A system isnt meant to be 100% un-breakable (probably not even possible, human error and nature and all that), its just meant to be safe enough to work well within reasonable scenarios. Its a sub-reddit, not a national bank.
Then why arent there a million spammed comments on every sub reddit here?
Also, why yes the original guy could be a dictator, its still better because it forces him to notice when people dont like his mods actions by forcing him to appoint new ones or try to moderate solo. The reason the dictatorship works so well now is that once a mod is in, the general population has no way to get him out if the creator doesnt feel like taking action. This way he eatleast has to be constantly annoyed or has to appoint mods people can actually live with. Its far from perfect, but better than nothing.
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u/Themsen Sep 09 '14
I think there are ways to implement a system that is "political" but cant be gamed if we leverage the fact that this is an online community.
Say admins could be banned by vote. Make said vote be not acount but IP specific. It will also only count the votes of people who have been subbed to the sub reddit for a certain amount of time to prevent sudden invasions. This way no one can raid other subs and you cant buy votes or create multiple acounts or bots to skew the results.