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2024 points randlet | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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VikingCoder ◴[] No.17516310[source]
I've begged GitHub to institute forms of government for repos.

For X action to happen, Y percent of the pool of people in the Z list need to approve it.

Membership of the Z list is granted when W percent of the T pool approve it.

Modifying the rules of government of this repo can only happen when L percent of the R pool approve it.

And on and on...

I could imagine a city or state government actually having its laws encoded in Github, and Github itself enforces the governmental system of checks and balances. Congress. Senate. President. Veto. Overriding a Veto. Laws of succession. Elections. On and on.

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_wmd ◴[] No.17516404[source]
Technology cannot solve social problems
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jpfed ◴[] No.17516711[source]
Wasn't it nice that you could reply to this comment over the web rather than physically going to the commenter and telling them what you thought? Boy, this technology sure gave a helpful assist to the social problem of communication.
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_wmd ◴[] No.17516890[source]
OP wants code to legislate trust problems within a small, closed group, however no amount of code can ever solve trust problems within a small, closed group.

No amount of code thrown at people mismanaging their relationship with other people will ever help people more effectively manage their relationship with those people -- it just creates artificial obstacles that further exacerbate or obscure the problem.

There is simply no combination or refinement of the logic OP proposed that would ever be perfectly sufficient to avert the need for human judgement in their scenario.

What if 51% of the project simultaneously reveal themselves to be alt-right fanatics who want to take the work in a new, fundamentally evil direction, ideologically aberrant to OP? Oh that's easy - OP can just step in with his admin privileges and disable their access. And that just underscores the point -- the original voting logic was a facade, and the original trust problem remained. The presence of that logic failed to solve any problem, the reality was always a true power structure that differed from the imaginary codified structure.

Perhaps one alternative would be for OP to give up admin rights entirely - but only a fool would believe a bunch of codified rules spread across a couple of software functions could ever perfectly mediate the complexities of a community of people in every possible scenario.

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1. jpfed ◴[] No.17517228[source]
I hadn't considered the problem to be solved one of trust (which I agree can't be solved with technology), but rather one of coordination/ social choice. Technology again is a valuable assist in this sphere (e.g. evaluating the results of theoretically-nice-but-computationally-heavy voting methods like Schultz or Kemeny-Young).