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Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

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Re: Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

#71

Post by Lerc »

throwup238 wrote: post #57
Lerc wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe you are capable of doing that yourself?

All you have to do is flip the tortoise back over. > You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is t…

The point of the test is to see if the subject has had life experience enough that they could restrain their own empathy.

Wanting to flip the tortoise back over was why he failed the test.

Re: Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

#72

Post by ninjagoo »

thoughtpeddler wrote: post #39
ninjagoo wrote: post #35

Society is not ready for an AI world: any platform that does not guarantee anonymity will be of limited utility for social discourse in a world lurching towards authoritarianism, and any platform that does guarantee anonymity can no longer reliably distinguish human from ai; not that that should matter when it's ideas that are being debated. But the bigger issue is the control of money: hierarchical institutions disi…

I agree on the importance of anonymity for social discourse. But if a tool/platform like Polis is some equivalent of a local 'town hall meeting', where there is no anonymity (and you as a citizen publicly appear, state your name, make your argument, etc), then why is lack of anonymity a threat in this specific context?

Because town hall meetings don't work in an authoritarian world.

Re: Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

#73

Post by ninjagoo »

worldsayshi wrote: post #50
warkdarrior wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who is going to be a trusted identity provider in authoritarian regimes?

Yeah, I mean that is definitely an additional hard nut to crack. I also think it has potential (partial) solutions. I'm thinking that there are many ways to prove identity information. You could use something like tlsnotary to prove that you can log in to a certain web page (i.e. you are an employee of corp X). You can prove that you know someone that know person Y given certain encrypted data. I just think that Zero…

Maybe the solution is to accept that anonymity comes with the trade-off that bots will also participate. The dependency then is on effective moderation.

Perhaps effective moderation is achievable today through, dare I say it - bots? They certainly seem capable of it now, perhaps more effectively than the average human?

Re: Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

#74

Post by sapphicsnail »

gpm wrote: post #28
sapphicsnail wrote: post #8

I don't understand the utility of this. Maybe it works for things like noise ordinances, but I can't imagine finding common ground with people who want me dead or imprisoned simply for existing.

Those people came to those views somehow. I'd hope that a less radicalizing social media platform might move them away from those views. Finding common ground isn't just about figuring out where people currently agree, it's also an act of persuasion convincing people to change views to then-mutually shared views. Wanting people dead or imprisoned simply for existing is the sort of inconsistent view that is likely eas…

> Wanting people dead or imprisoned simply for existing is the sort of inconsistent view that is likely easiest to change by moving people out of radicalized spaces...

I just don't see how polis would do this. As far as I can tell this is largely about asking a questionnaire and then a polity can view the different responses and try to find legislation that's acceptable to the largest group of people.

There are some people you can reason with but if someone has priors they aren't willing to examine there's not much you can do. I don't think we could workshop our way to civil rights.

Re: Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

#75

Post by johnecheck »

saulpw wrote: post #69
tamimio wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I am more interested in seeing, hopefully, in the future is the ability to cast citizens' votes directly on any matter, act, bill, etc., and get rid of the representatives in parliament/congress/etc. It is more transparent that way, and end lobbying with all the corruption it has. No more traditional voting for a "person" anymore and relying on trust; rather, you trust no one and vote directly. We have the prope…

Regardless of ignorance, people don't vote even every year or two, because it's inconvenient, they're busy, and they become cynical after months of negative campaigning on both sides. We need "assigned voting" where you can assign your vote to another person, who then can assign their votes to another person, etc, creating a chain of voting hierarchy such that a few people control large numbers of aggregate votes, an…

You're describing Liquid Democracy[1]. Seems challenging to implement but definitely an interesting idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy

Re: Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

#76

Post by fc417fc802 »

acgourley wrote: post #58
frogperson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like a cert chain, but it would need to be both simple to use and secure. Those two requirements are greatly at odds with each other.

Yeah one reason I think the government has to offer this is usability. While you can imagine a purely p2p protocol between cypherpunks, for everyone else there needs to be a way to social workers, DMV staff, etc can deal with edge cases (such as your id being stolen and needing a reset). Furthermore it helps if it's super illegal to tamper with this network (consider how rare check fraud is, despite being easy).

Check fraud is easy to commit but not easy to get away with while also benefiting financially.

It's also illegal to steal things but that happens much more frequently because it's often fairly easy to get away with.

Re: Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

#77

Post by samename »

worldsayshi wrote: post #38
acgourley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really need proof of soul systems to exist, extended to also have a proof of citizenship. While the proof of soul systems can plausible be done in a decentralized manner, proof of citizenship is much harder, and in my opinion this is one of (the few) things the government should really do.

What about Zero-Knowledge Identity? Use zero knowledge proofs to prove that I have an eID without actually providing my identity.

EFF has a good write-up about zero-knowledge: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/zero-knowledge-proofs-...

> What ZKPs don’t do is mitigate verifier abuse or limit their requests, such as over-asking for information they don’t need or limiting the number of times they request your age over time. They don’t prevent websites or applications from collecting other kinds of observable personally identifiable information like your IP address or other device information while interacting with them.

Re: Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

#78

Post by saulpw »

johnecheck wrote: post #75
saulpw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of ignorance, people don't vote even every year or two, because it's inconvenient, they're busy, and they become cynical after months of negative campaigning on both sides. We need "assigned voting" where you can assign your vote to another person, who then can assign their votes to another person, etc, creating a chain of voting hierarchy such that a few people control large numbers of aggregate votes, an…

You're describing Liquid Democracy[1]. Seems challenging to implement but definitely an interesting idea. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy

I didn't know this had a name, thank you so much!

Re: Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

#79

Post by cosmic_cheese »

renato_shira wrote: post #59
goda90 wrote: post #12

What are some strategies a platform like this can take against spam or influence bots? Tying real life identities to users would certainly limit that(though identity theft and account selling could still happen), but that adds friction to joining, poses security risks, and many people might feel less comfortable putting their opinions openly online where backlash could impact real life.

[dead]

It might be an unpopular idea, but I think being somewhat liberal with doling out timeouts and bans for inflammatory/reactionary/overemotional posting would do a lot of good, too. It strongly crystalizes community norms and sends a message that this is a space to engage with the higher functioning portions of your brain instead of letting your amygdala and dopamine pathways take the wheel.

Edit: Why is parent comment flagged/dead? Doesn’t seem that controversial?

Re: Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

#80

Post by ianburrell »

mmooss wrote: post #34
goda90 wrote: post #12

What are some strategies a platform like this can take against spam or influence bots? Tying real life identities to users would certainly limit that(though identity theft and account selling could still happen), but that adds friction to joining, poses security risks, and many people might feel less comfortable putting their opinions openly online where backlash could impact real life.

For many purposes, we need anonymous authentication. I haven't heard about much innovation on that and similar privacy fronts in awhile. Off the top of my head, a possible method is a proxy or two or three, each handling different components of authentication and without knowledge of the other components. They return a token with validity properties (such as duration, level of service). All the vendor (e.g., Polis) w…

You could do it now with OpenID SSO that only takes passkeys. The downside is that losing the passkey would lose the account. The problem is that OpenID leaks the authenticating sites to authentication site.

The problem is that lots of sites need/want email address. So would need system for anonymous email, and that would either need real email to forward, or way to read email.

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