A reality check from a Facebook acquaintance, on the Mastodon migration: "You know what’s kinda funny? A bunch of modern progressive/dem socialists think corporations need to be more democratized, with shared ownership among workers and all that. Musk in under two months has ran Twitter more democratically than any other major business, and he’s included the customers/users in that process as well. But they’ll still hate him for it."
@JKuznicki Last I checked, sham elections aren't considered democratic.
@LouisIngenthron What would you change about these polls to make them not a sham?
@JKuznicki Lots.
1) Run them for longer than a day or provide some advance notice they're happening.
2) Make the results binding
3) Use a voting medium that's not so ridiculously susceptible to being gamed by bots.
And that's before we get into stuff like the changing of the options because he didn't like how the poll was going.
@LouisIngenthron All of those might be nice, but I don't think any of them adds up to what we've seen lately not being a modicum of democracy.
I think it is a modicum of democracy, and that it's just not necessarily an improvement to have it.
@JKuznicki By that logic, Russia also has "a modicum of democracy" because they have elections.
But we all know there's a difference between the show that's put on and the reality, and we don't call that sham "democracy".
@LouisIngenthron And to be clear, I'm not defending him here. I'm asking people to think about how great they believe democracy is--and maybe ask less of it.
@JKuznicki I'd argue that the clearest example of democracy in this whole situation is the mass of people voting with their feet to leave Twitter.
You may note that they're typically not voting in Elon's polls.
@LouisIngenthron But that's anti-democratic. That's refusing to participate.
@JKuznicki On the contrary. If you refuse to participate in democracy in your country, you're still bound by the laws enacted by those you didn't elect.
In this case, folks are choosing to abandon the service because of the decisions of it's leaders in favor of other services. That's the strongest form of voting the free market allows.
@LouisIngenthron I am still bound by Twitter's terms of service, should I ever go back there. What am I missing?
And I repeat, consumer choice is nothing like democracy. If given the chance, a majority of the whole electorate probably wouldn't vote even to approve of the existence of Mastodon. And yet we're both here. Consumer choice does things that democracy is afraid to do.
@JKuznicki If you chose to leave, then it doesn't matter, because those terms only bound you for content you produce on their property.
Even if it's not an explicit option in the poll Elon posts, leaving the platform for another is absolutely an implicit voting option in every service we choose to patronize.
In this particular case, it's just a question of whether you view the electorate as encompassing only "twitter customers" or all "social media users".
@LouisIngenthron Offhand I would say Musk isn't obviously gaming the results, and he's abiding by them even when it seems like he'd be foolish to do so. I don't recall Putin doing either of those things. I stress that it's a low bar, but it still seems like a rough kind of democracy to me.