I am anxiously awaiting the day we do this for politicians.
A new political party whose beliefs, policy platform, speeches, and votes are tied to constantly evolving real-time demands of its app users (err...constituents)
I would vote for any candidate that committed to letting its registered users decide every vote he or she made.
Direct democracy is a terrible idea. Voters have shown again and again they that they don't understand what they are voting for. Most voters only understand "pretty words" and have no intention or will to understand issues at a deeper level.
“we must above all rid ourselves of the very Western, very bourgeois and therefore contemptuous attitude that the masses are incapable of governing themselves. In fact, experience proves that the masses understand perfectly the most complicated problems. [...] the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning and to learn all the tricks of the trade. If recourse is had to technical language, this signifies that it has been decided to consider the masses as uninitiated. [...] Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.”
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, pp. 188–189
"Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand."
Nobody wants the public to understand, they want the public to support their position. So the information that the public receives will always be completely distorted, and people who work will not have the time to untwist it.
Maybe the public needn't understand, or vote on what "is" - but they can vote on what "ought" to be.
They cannot vote that every bus be on time - this isn't guaranteed to be possible, nor should politicians imply it could be. But they can set the priority, and % of the budget, allocated to improving bus times.
You cannot vote that the sky is green, or that 2 + 2 =5; but you can dictate that society be governed as if these things are true. You can't dictate results: that all endeavours are successful, all wars won; but you can say what endeavours are budgeted, wars are fought - and what resources are allocated to them.
The problem is that informed framing is so hard that this isn't always possible without truth being held hostage by motivated gatekeepers.
Seriously. I would love to see these so-called "again and again" examples.
Anecdote: I'm involved in local politics and one of the biggest problems I see resulting from "direct" citizen/constituent involvement initiatives is that they are fundamentally predicated on attracting people who want to oppose & object to things (sometimes to bad things, but very often to positive, progressive initiatives). Because of the effort barrier to involvement, those who are actively engaged tend to be people who have a problem with something, which means the "I agree with this ongoing initiative" voice is lost.
I don't think you need examples of poor decisions to see the problems with direct democracy.
Take Brexit, and let's lay aside the question of whether or not it was a good idea, for the sake of argument let's just acknowledge there were strong feelings on both sides.
The fact that it was a referendum meant that for the sake of a very small margin, an enormous number of people are very unhappy with the result.
And if the government had backtracked on the referendum result, the same issue would apply - in terms of being a united nation we were screwed either way.
In representative democracy, by way of comparison, such a small margin would mean the winner had to tread a very careful line with any legislation they tried to pass, thus in general leading to more reasonable compromise solutions.
I mentioned I was talking about local politics. Issues are complex at every level, but I do think people are better equipped to make informed decisions the "closer" they are to an issue.
The EU is an unbelievably abstracted entity, and with trans-national issues in general, I think it would be difficult to find any example of a resolution that makes everyone happy.
Here's a few observations though:
- I'm guessing from your comment you would rather Brexit hadn't passed. Do you think it wouldn't have happened if it had been up to govt. (without referendum)?
- one should also look at things holistically: do you think Brexit would have ever been proposed (in the form that it was) if people were more directly involved in the decision-making that led to its formation as an idea?
- a vote for Brexit was ultimately a vote of dissatisfaction with a large range of other political issues people felt they didn't have enough of a direct say in. If those various areas were more open to public involvement, would we have had the level of discontent that drove the Brexit vote?
> In representative democracy, by way of comparison, such a small margin would [...] (lead) to more reasonable compromise solutions.
Ultimately, I don't buy this. It's not necessarily true at all. But even if it were, the same would be true of a direct-democracy approach because what you're comparing is representative democracy with 1 big binary vote at the end, where in reality greater engagement in the process as a whole would lead to a very different referendum proposal document (if any).
I decline to derail this with my own views on Brexit itself, but in answer to your question on what would have happened, I think if it was up to the government they would have bumbled along with one foot in the EU door much like before (not joining the Euro/Schengen, special conditions for the UK) which from outside might be seen as a reasonable compromise between the different factions of the UK.
I used to be in favour of direct democracy btw and somewhat changed my mind lately. The 2019 Reith lectures may have something to do with it - Sumption raised quite a lot of points I hadn't thought of before, in particular making a link between direct democracy and our lawyer-up culture of everyone-suing-everyone-else-all-the-time (the linking factor being the appropriate role of judges in society). I think he would also say it's the first past the post system that has caused so much alienation from the political process (when so many have votes that don't count), rather than there being a problem with representative democracy per se. Worth a listen (also on any podcast app):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00057m9/episodes/player
I would add that there's a bunch of other issues that caused that alienation, not least mainstream economics being so far divorced from reality for so long; also our media is a disgrace (not that I have any ideas for fixing it I'm afraid).
So would it have happened if we had direct democracy beforehand? I don't know, but I reckon we'd have replaced one problem with another one generating just as much discontent.
Sorry I had missed your context on local issues, you are right about the EU being abstract to most people, though there will always be issues in trying to draw a line between local and global.
> he would also say it's the first past the post system that has caused so much alienation from the political process
I think I'd agree with this analysis. I live in Ireland, where we have PRSTV (for somewhat hilarious historical reasons while we were under British rule—a Unionist minority wanting better representation in local politics[0]), and while our representative democracy is still riddled with problems and voter alienation, I still think those are multifaceted and have various other complex causes; PRSTV itself is pretty decent as far as representative systems go.
I moved to Ireland five years ago and I can say I’ve never seen a saner political environment in my life. It’s hard to polarise when extremes are punished harshly and that, while makes it hard to differentiate between parties, it brings a lot of stability.
Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Orban, and so many others wouldn’t be possible here.
Don't wanna get into political shit flinging but the fact that you equate positive and progressive is telling. From my own (as-yet unpublished) research, one of the most common questions when queried about the term "progressive" is (paraphrased): "until what end?"
Answer that explicitly (without changing the language used by the opposition) and you might make more, um, progress.
It's all subjective if course, but I didn't equate them, I added the word "positive" as a qualifier in the hope the extra adjective would help disambiguation.
Of course not all progress is positive so I was narrowing the scope of the word to limit it to only progressive initiatives that benefit a majority of constituents (in particular, in this example, an absent majority)
A very useful question. In any disagreement, it's important to answer both "What would change my mind?" and "How will I know I am done/have won?"
Without answers to both of those, it is difficult to win over anyone who doesn't already agree. The first question shows that one is acting in informed good faith. The second lets people know exactly what they are being asked to agree with.
Politicians have also shown again and again they don't understand what they are voting for, and/or don't care. Caring about the outcome is at least an improvement.
So people are unable to vote on issues but somehow intelligent enough to identify the candidate who best represents their interests? If most voters only understand pretty words, what difference does it make if those words are in a campaign for a piece of legislation put to direct vote or in the mouth of a political candidate?
I think the idea is that you can spend the time once every few years to research a candidate, review key policy positions, etc.
Not saying its the best system but just want to point out that there is a time element. People can't spend time understanding each piece of legislation in general.
How do you evaluate a community organizer/constitutional law professor as a candidate for the US Senate? Or a real estate billionaire for President? What about the foreign policy positions of someone who's never run anything larger than a city? What more is there than pretty words in these cases?
Human intuition is much better equipped to judge intuitively whether a person or a group can be trusted than it is to judge whether a piece of legislation was written by a trustworthy person or whether that legislation is effective
I think that direct democracy can work for local issues. People need to be engaged with what they are voting on, things that effect their lives, things they have a real stake in. An example might be a few hundred people in a room seeking consensus on local government taxes and services.
Local issues are simple compared to national or international issues: they affect less people, mostly a community that may already form a group of likewise thinking people or similar categories of people. Larger issues affect much different people, with impacts that may be harder to understand.
That is some of the reasoning behind the US Constitution. Federalist 9 and 10 address the effectiveness of direct democracy at a small scale and the utter failure that direct democracy is at a large scale. Once you get past a tribe size, opposing factions come into play. Factions are not bad but direct democracy at scale leads to the largest faction ruling over all. Ideally, all factions come to a consensus on what is best for all instead of fighting for total control.
People can also decide for themselves if something is an issue important to them enough to vote personally, or not important enough that can be delegated to someone they trust. This is usually called liquid democracy, as it allows to change the amount of directness vs delegation.
To deter intimidation, ordinary voters should have secret ballots. But to provide accountability, powerful voters should not have secret ballots.
Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to draw a dividing line between ordinary voters and powerful ones in a liquid democracy method to satisfy both of these criteria.
No one should have a secret ballot. A vote is a dry run for a civil war, and if one can't even publicly say that he supports a law how will he be able to help to enact that law when it is passed?
There is a curious historical fact, that in ancient Rome secret ballot was introduced in 137 BC only 14 years before Gaius Gracchus, when people being able to vote for reforms but not being able to support that reforms greatly contributed to the downfall of the republic.
Moreover the main reason that we need secret ballot now, is that elections are rare, reward for intimidating someone is huge (4 years of power), and reward for voting differently is tiny and uncertain (one or the other politician not keeping promises). But with issue based voting reward for intimidating is very small as the law can be repealed when people understand that they were forced to do something harmful to themselves, and reward for not being intimidated is much more certain.
Another source of intimidation is the opinion of friends and peers, but if you support a law for which your friends do not want to talk with you, either they are not real friends or you should not support that law. In either case being open is better than lying.
Firstly people will be afraid to support their opinion via voting in many cases because they will be concerned not so much with their friends, but with their employers and colleagues. In Rome only citizens could vote, and sure not all citizens were rich but they were generally speaking not the bottom rungs of society and would be less concerned about their job than many of the poorest citizens in today's society.
It isn't just intimidation it is also a method by which buying votes directly is disincentivized.
Sure technically I can claim to sell my vote now, but the person buying it is taking it on faith I am actually selling it, which means nobody tries to actually buy votes directly. They will attempt to buy votes by say, bribing people in certain positions to endorse them, but they won't try and do so directly.
Being able to sell and buy votes is a good thing, it allows people to compromise. Now it doesn't work because a vote is a rare resource which cannot be priced, but when there are frequent votes on individual issues, you can think of a monetary price for it, or support one law in exchange for someone else supporting a law you care about. Today when politician promises to raise some taxes and reduce others, it is also a method of buying votes, but indirect and prone to fraud.
In Rome there was a clear hierarchy of patrons that was much more influential than what we have in today's society. Secret ballot broke it, and the result was a disaster.
Take a look at https://voteflux.org which explains the idea better than i do. To pass a law you need a large majority to support it, and the rest to accept it enough to not go to constitutional court. And if you are able to bribe such a large number of people continously, it means that they get more profit from the law than from repealing it, so your law is good for society.
The other side of that is that Hacker News and Reddit and other upvote/downvote cultured sites often have shown that the first upvotes and downvotes on a topic often are the ones that win out because people just bandwagon them
The year is 2040: The USA now has exactly 69 states and the official currency is doge coin. Elon Musk is the Supreme Overlord for life and was the first leader of the United States to have a Department of Memes.
I think I saw someone suggest using a multi-armed bandit algorithm with upvotes as the objective. I'd like to see that!
An algorithm like that would balance the exploitation of showing current highly upvoted posts first with the exploration of showing posts with few votes first, so that every post gets its chance while still penalizing spam posts once they're conclusively known to be bad.
What if the app made you take a test to understand what you're voting for? (Yes I'm aware poll tests have been abused in the past to disenfranchise people, let's assume we can create an app with fair tests)
This app would make sense as an instant polling tool to give politicians instant, and evolving, feedback. So, this isn't direct democracy. In the current system, the representative is expected to vote on behalf of their constituents, using some level of personal judgment. This app would allow decisions to be made more quickly and better represent the view of the constituency.
Imagine being able to go back and see what the constituents demanded, and what the representative decided. One could then look at outcomes and determine how reliable a politician's judgment is.
>Voters have shown again and again they that they don't understand what they are voting for.
This includes politicians, senators and every other kind of 'representative'. Often they don't even read what they vote on, and you can duckduckgo that.
> Eh ballot-based democracy like the Swiss has seems to work quite well for centuries now.
OP was proposing replacing the current system with direct democracy whereas the swiss simply hold referenda on specific issues while they still have representatives to govern them.
Meanwhile, on the issues that they do vote on through referenda, it can result in popular support for discriminatory laws like the ban on ....Muslim temples with pointy roofs:
> The Swiss government recommended that the proposed amendment be rejected as inconsistent with the basic principles of the constitution.[3] However, after the results were tabulated, the government immediately announced that the ban was in effect.[4]
The problem is that people tend to believe that the outcome of an election or a referendum should be allowed to overrule basic human rights and national constitutions.
The suggestion being replied to here was: "I would vote for any candidate that committed to letting its registered users decide every vote he or she made."
I fail to see how that is substantially different from direct democracy.
What good would representative democracy be if each representative was just an empty vessel carrying out the collective wishes of a mass of Internet commenters?
This is widely-cited and has become a bit of a trope among many people here in Switzerland, but one famous example that isn't usually looked upon with pride today is the extremely delayed granting of suffrage to women in Switzerland (1971 nationally, 1991 in the last canton), or the current same-sex marriage referendum considered long-overdue by some. There are a few other human/civil rights along this vein that, at least to me, point to the possibility of a better system that can balance direct democracy (at least in the sense of modern Switzerland, California on a state level, etc.) with some longstanding sense of inherent rights.
While I agree, do you think US senators understand the nuances of tech? What about the senator who was complaining about a fake report about Biden and "no meat" and people would have to start drinking plant based beer. Also, one of the bills in January was 290 pages and delivered hours before a vote was to happen. Even if people could understand the issue there isn't time. Most bills are just a compromise packed with garbage.
I don't think direct democracy but I would like a second level that is local. The number of people represented by each politician is 10x higher than it was 200 years ago. I would like there to be 10 elected officials instead and have a delegate in DC that votes as the 10 dictate. It would be easy to do with today's technology. It greatly helps with disenfranchisement. It also gives people someone they can go to with issues that need solved.
The major problem with politics nowadays is that it has become a "job", so people need to be re-elected to keep their life running; if they don't, they don't have anything else to do.
It shouldn't be like that: people should be elected for a duty, and after their duty is done, they should go back to their normal job, not seek infinite re-election.
The counter-argument to these sorts of notions (including things like legislative term limits) is that, in a sufficiently advanced political environment, this will make your representatives even more dependent on entrenched power-brokers to be effective—chiefly, bureaucrats and lobbyists.
Unless their job is held for them while they serve (like maternity or military leave), they're going to spend the final year of their term job-hunting. Do you want your elected representative handing out resumes to powerful people hoping to curry their favor?
True, but what I meant was, in the context of the conversation, that the system must not be ignorant of the fact that regular people need to earn a living, and provide opportunities for regular people to participate without sacrificing a significant amount of time to fundraising.
I don’t know what the best solution is but if the system is only practically open to those that don’t need to work for a living then things surely will stay the same.
I have strong opinions on a lot of laws I have not actually read. I will rely on experts, and so do politicians (that might be experts within their party, staff, lobbyists ...). The main skill is to decide whom to trust. I do not really see any alternative - I do not think a parliament with hundreds of delegates spending most of their day reading complex legal texts would be any better than what we see today. Still, I am sure most politicians spend much more time and resources to inform their vote than the average citizen.
What happens when those expert staff are deliberately pushing an agenda? Perfect example of politicians not knowing anything about what they're voting for is the absurd Article 13 in EU. Something that was impossible for anyone not called Alphabet or Facebook.
If they did know what they were voting for, that is far worse...
An alternative is having bills that are for a single issue that a layperson can understand. It is not just the politicians that need to understand what they are voting on. The people need to understand them too so they are aware when their representation is voting against their interests.
That seems reasonable to me. I'm in the UK, and I don't expect all 650 MPs to have a detailed understanding of 4 different pieces of legislation per day [0]. I _do_ expect them to have a brief pack from their staffers explaining what they're voting for though.
>I'm in the UK, and I don't expect all 650 MPs to have a detailed understanding of 4 different pieces of legislation per day
I respectfully disagree. The MPs (Members of Parliament) receive substantial remuneration to represent their constituents ─ including business expenses related to equipment, premises, staff, maintaining a second home etc. The main remit of their job is to be knowledgeable and informed of the bills they are voting upon. Most of these bills go through a lengthy process of debates, stages, readings and 'ping-pong' between HoC and HoL, before gaining the Royal Assent. There are absolutely no excuses for having a 'brief pack' and then vote based on a toss of a coin. Your reasonable expectation breeds complacency and apathy, absolving public servants of responsibility. As a taxpayer and a citizen, it is especially important to demand more at this crucial juncture, where they are stripping away any laws, which can be used to hold themselves accountable, whilst introducing Draconian measures.
> But it isn’t hard to beat our current system of selling votes to the highest bidding lobbyist.
There's 20 different ways to fix it already implemented in the rest of the world. Starting with a sane vote-counting system and low threshold on financing political parties from anywhere except the state budget.
The general public is surely flawed in a variety of ways (as are politicians, in the same ways and others), but a well written system could highlight these shortcomings, and we could work on addressing them over time.
It wasn't all that long ago that basic reading and arithmetic were beyond the majority of people, but we recognized that and took steps to remedy it, with some decent success.
Deploying such a system into production would be a long, careful process, running it in parallel (with no power) to simply measure public sentiment would be extremely informative, and it would also get the public thinking seriously about things...simply using a well designed system would make them smarter.
There is some interesting research into this, also known as liquid democracy, if somebody wants to Google that. I'm personally not a big fan, because it's very difficult to organize it in such a way that there is not some form of mob mentality. Representative democracy has some downsides but it also has a lot of advantages that we simply take for granted.
I was talking to a guy who's planning to launch a series of hyper-local political parties in the UK (starting in Harrogate).
He told me about how things work in Taiwan - using a bit of software called Polis - designed to find consensus amongst differing opinions, and using that as the basis for policy decisions.
This guy was going to use Polis to poll party members so the representatives would be governed directly by feedback from members - with Polis ensuring that it didn't break down into factionalism.
Have you tried getting the Polis open source code running? Last time I tried there was some sort of error resulting in not passing JS files to the browser.
It would be a populist hellhole. Huge masses of people who believe that some crazy thing happened (which didn't really happen) and demand the government do something about it.
I like the advantages of representative democracy, and would keep it, but modify it so that you have a continuous vote.
Your decision-making representative can change each day as people move their vote around; rather than only on election day.
I think a lot of disillusionment in democracy comes when you expect to see political corruption the day after the election, and can't do anything about it for N years.
Maybe you could get those advantages in a practical and safe way with a recall mechanism. You’d have the standard representative, multi-year-term for most stuff, but a continuous recall poll (with a fairly high bar). This would essentially establish an approval floor.
It would be tricky to implement this. It’s hard enough to get people to vote one a year. If you go digital you have security and equity issues. You’d need some kind of rolling window to count votes.
Either the bar for re-call is too low, such that evidently popular candidates face an energy-, cash-, and time-wasting re-election campaign, or the bar is too high, because a signature-collecting campaign can never match the energy of election day.
Continuous voting is (more) practical.
Elected candidates would face a constant risk of being out-voted, but it's generally a very low risk, because the balance of the votes is unlikely to switch overnight - it was either foreseeable or there was some democratically-relevant scandal.
One issue preventing such parties, is that people do not have time and interest to think about all the issues and there needs to be a way to delegate and trade votes.
But another issue is lack of an easy way to onboard new people, because now a party needs to gather a large support to become useful. Maybe if they partner with a petition site like change.org that would both try to influence existing politicians and serve as a way for new people to get involved with the real thing, they would get the necessary viral growth.
That's several direct democracy parties where I live but to date none have won a seat. It's an interesting concept but I can think of many ways it could go horribly wrong (think Reddit with the marathon bombing). Also wouldn't such a system still be beholden to lobbying groups (possibly more so)?
We have had one direct democracy party reach majority and form a government with hilarious results. The moment they had power direct democracy ideas died. In a single term they found themselves at government with the left, the alt right, then a large coalition, then a technical government. They should have self financed the direct democracy platform using their salary, and basically stopped doing that most immediately. The platform holder dragged them to tribunal, and party ownership is currently undecided.
The FiveStar party in Italy did this. They had an online platform for their members, and apparently the way it went was that they'd first massage everyones opinion in the forums, and then let them vote.
I read it in a great long read from Wired called 'What Happens When Techno-Utopians Actually Run a Country'.
We’ve had the technology to do this for many decades, but we don’t do it because of the insane overheads at modern scale, and because the permanent campaigning and rabble-rousing required would make governance for even the medium term very difficult.
The general public are unlikely to produce a coherent set of policies one bill at a time, and trying to manage the contradictions they produce will suck any government into the quagmire. For example, the U.K. electorate were happy to vote for Brexit paradoxes like the NI border, which parliament and the government are still unable to square after years of trying.
I was thinking about something like this about 15 years ago. Speaking to friends in politics, there feeling wasn't that people wouldn't grasp the issues themselves, but rather that the long-term consequences of decisions often wouldn't be considered.
This is a "rich" statement coming from politicians, but if you look at how easily people are influenced by media, you can probably see how this could go wrong very quickly.
However, perhaps there is a solution that meets in the middle.
Another issue of course is that commercial interests who in many cases would be able to (and already do) outbid the public.
You don't want everyone voting on every issue, and I don't want you voting on every issue. This is why we have a representative democracy, it's also why we have separate specializations for doctors and mechanics.
How would you represent the will of people who cannot afford the devices needed to run the app? Or whose lives are too busy working multiple jobs to keep up with the app?
I tried to answer this a few times but I am reserved to the fact that I am not able to solve this problem in a comment section.
America's 200+ year old democracy still has around 56% turnout for national and 27% turnout for local elections (quick Google 2020). This does not even address how poorly the current system still fails the 56% of people that manage to vote. It is not perfect.
If any alternative or improvement proposed to that system is held to a standard of 'must be perfect', I think they will fall short no matter how good the intention may be or how good it improves on the current way.
If poor people cannot vote, it is voter suppression and not acceptable. This is not about reaching perfection, it is about not backsliding to exclude a major demographic.
When people will be able to vote on individual issues, and will be able to introduce new law projects, the whole dynamics of voting will change. Because people will be able to trade votes.
Buying a phone for someone so that your law gets one more vote will be very natural, so all the poor people will get new phones very soon. And that will not be a bad thing, because politician will not be able to buy votes then pass a law to take the same money back from people. In effect this will morph into a sort of UBI, where some people pay others to keep society running with laws that they think are beneficial for everyone. And people who think they know better will be able to gather in separate cities and try out the laws they think will be better.
But the rich and middle class already do that in the form of paying taxes and government transferring part of that taxes to the poor. The only difference will be that poor will know exactly who is helping them, instead of thanking government and politicians, and half of the transferred money will not get wasted on politicians and bureaucracy.
Agreed, I am sorry that my idea was presented that way.
I was proposing modifying how we interact with elected officials, not modifying how we elect them.
I realize there are bad actors actively working to suppress voters rights in many places in many ways. and I dont want to even be accidently hitched to that bandwagon.
I think that's drawing a parallel between too distant lines. You can also argue that this is what employment is: your employer pays you wages to control what you do with your life, it's not wrong but it's not particularly helpful to the discussion I think
It is not distant at all. You pay someone to do stuff, that's what a job is. The "control another person's life" aspect is pure marketing talk.
From the look of it, it is not unlike patreon, intended for artists, they can make polls and have paying users vote. Users can also pay for special requests.
It looks like some people are using it reality TV style "where should I eat next?", why not, after all, reality TV actor is some kind of work too. Just like the 18+ version that is already all over the web.
No, it's not, except in the sense that everything is like everything. Hiring someone for work is for a product or service. The "service" I'm Uber is scoped to a narrow activity like a ride. This app is far more intimate.
So basically like chaturbate [1] and similar, but applied to daily life and without the nudity/sex aspect? I wonder how they plan on keeping that out since their terms [2] (seem to) mention they don't allow that.
>NewNew is the brainchild of Los Angeles-based entrepreneur Courtne Smith. The app, which is still in its "beta" or pre-full release stage, describes itself as "a human stock market where you buy shares in the lives of real people, in order to control their decisions and watch the outcome"
The 'mission statement' seems to suggest that the platform is adding an extra layer to commoditise the celebrity/personality and their lifestyle, by solidifying ephemeral contact built via other channels, into a direct-to-consumer approach, who then become investors and/or stockholders? There is also an overlap on features of other established networks, so it will be not be easy to carve out a niche.
Nonetheless, it seems like a warped enough concept to achieve some success, despite contributing further towards the erosion of society and burning or reviving the careers of some wannabe/z-list celebs, amongst others.
Hopefully without the annoyance of people "directing" performers without being willing to pay them ... which is something that often happens on websites like chaturbate. It's bizarre how manners go out the window as soon as someone's naked.
Would be interesting to figure out how large the role of the being naked part really is though. I can imagine the same 'directing' would take place on NewNew: when I first learned about the existence of chaturbate I went to have a look and I have to admit I was quite baffled by what went on there. Not really a pleasant experience actually. Even though I had the impression some performers really enjoyed it and were into it not just for the money, I couldn't shake off the uneasy feeling for the rest it was just poorer people being exploited. And the 'directing' was like vultures circling around reasoning 'well, the rest pays already, so I'm just going to ask anything I want without paying myself'. I would be surprised if that mindset would also not pop up when clothes stay on.
It wouldn't surprise me if an established NSFW platform adopted this feature as well, drawing away the people with those interests. And as the app developers have this rule from the beginning at least they're spared the backlash that Tumblr experienced when they banned nude content out of nowhere, paired with a content filter biased towards false positives.
Uhhhh i was gonna say what i really think about this app but... if u want me to say something nice first send $1 (venmo @johnromero44) but if u want me to really go off on it cough up $5 i will be waiting for 5 minutes thanks
wow a success, $5 received via NewNew HN Comment Plugin by Venmo, thanks to D.K. for paying to control me.
i started to wonder about the app after reading reviews for it and the reviews not matching up with the description of 'NewNew'. it seems like people have had it on their phone for years when it went by the name 'Suprize!'. it used to be some kind of free giveaway game app, promoted by musical artists on their instagram, but switched late last year to NewNew. as other commenters (who downloaded it to see what it was about) have said, people that already have a following are the only ones that can be 'controlled'.
there's a contrast between the way the app is exemplified in the article, vs the landing page in the iOS store. the BBC article uses contrived controlling behaviors example such as 'voting for an artist to paint a painting in a certain color' while the iOS app store shows a more realistic example of voting whether a girl should 'leave him' or 'msg him' - this fits in nicely with present day culture. but it immediately makes you wonder whats next; there's no reason for the antics to just stop there... cranking up unethical behavior is where something like this will really shine and become wildly successful. it even hints at what's to come in the form of voting on 'pranks' in a screenshot of users on the app, one of which is asking whether 'he should fill vinnies room with packing peanuts?' [0].
i can see an even more successful path forward for newnew if they eventually remove the limitation of only allowing beautiful or popular people from being controlled, to literally anyone who is willing to live stream something extreme and immoral (yet legal!!!) for a fee. bid on a random person with nothing to lose willing to go up to someone else and perform a 'prank' (use your imagination) -- stuff that people with a reputation on the line might not be willing to do. as other commenters have also pointed out, that seems like where this kind of thing is headed inevitably.
these thoughts were paid for by D.K. sorry there isnt more i spent too long enjoying reading the very entertaining reviews [1] for when the app was still called Surprize
> "It may not take long for a creator to go to more and more extreme lengths to attract votes from their followers, ending in potentially self-damaging or humiliating scenarios"
We've seen this on Twitch with streamers doing "marathons" for getting more subs and therefore money...
The model for this app clearly will force the creators to do more "interesting" or "risky" questions to grab attention. If it gets enough traction , it's not going to end well.
Livestreamers have it bad enough already when they allow viewers who donate to play audio or TTS over their speakers.
Here is one hilariously tragic example with a Seattle livestreamer who went by the name "Arab Andy" while in a UW classroom. Hint: it landed him in jail.
It's not alarming, it's merely despicable. It shouldn't alarm (which requires surprise) anybody given the condition of the rapidly collapsing culture in the US, it should be entirely expected at this point. It's pop culture narcissistic sleeze taken to the next level. It'll keep going, keep getting worse, until society has had enough and begins to reject it. Take this thing and make it worse, take it up a notch, someone will eventually find success with that, and so on it will spiral.
Until then, the US will continue to plumb the depths of how far a culture can erode before a bottom is discovered.
zyper.com which was adquired by Discord, tried the same approach, but I think there was always the issue of the advertising platform.
The biggest public forums now-a-days are org-owned online platforms. Even if you have amazing content creators, you still have to find a way to co-exist with the platform, controlled by giants.
I too, see value a potentially transformative business model, but it still seems a hard place to start in until you've achieved a good enough network effect.
Putting aside the getting paid part, it reminds me of cult classic novel "The Dice man", which I read about here few years ago, except instead of chance, people choose.
Let's call it "Social Media Successful" where lots of people pile on (platform profits) with a subsequent avalanche of unintended fucked up consequences (public bears the cost).
"It is aimed at what it calls "creators" - writers, painters, musicians"
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Very soon the app's investors will realize that there's no money in musicians, but appeal to lowest animalistic desires - power, greed, lust - is where all the money are. The app will morph to cater to that: it'll become more addictive and more extortive, i.e. more "engaging" in the corp double speak. Investors will get massive returns, the crowd will get another amplifier of their lowest desires.
Funny, I was thinking of a very similar idea. I don't care much about most things, and I have a huge problem choosing or making up my mind. Why not crowdsource it?
I'm surprised people would pay you for it, but maybe not that surprised if you give them more control over yourself.
Like doing something they say, wearing a dumb T-Shirt they send or recording yourself shouting something in a crowd (actually, there were people on Fiverr doing this already, just not in an embarrassing way).
Curious, I downloaded the app. The feed I was presented with was 90% girls in low cut tops, and everything is paywalled until you pay for votes.
If you want to become a "creator" (so you can run your own polls and make money), you need to join a waiting list where they will analyze the follower count of your other social media accounts to ensure you are worthy.
The (iOS) app itself was annoying to navigate without a native swipe back gesture. Amazing that it has so many 5 star reviews.
Ultimately, the BBC article and amount of 5 star reviews this app has screams to me PR company media blitz to generate buzz, and nothing about this seems organic.
Ugh. Just as I suspected. The pure idea of it has merit. It could be very helpful to true creators to get feedback and develop community. But there's a lot of risk of base instincts and abuse of others for one's own anonymous entertainment. It could turn sick fast.
I only know of Twitch from reading about it, but it was my impression that's exactly what Twitch is. (well, one of the things it is, and a major one, anyway)
Unfortunately, there is no website/web frontend/web app. I think I am too old to understand why people try to force you to install their app instead of providing at least some fallback website.
Branding and taking control of your terminal to get more data about you.
With a browser you click on the same icon then reach the desired page, and if the browser employs some form of ad blocking or malware filtering, a webpage can't do much to scan your device for interesting personal data. An app is quite different for being an executable you installed on your device after it requested access to everything, so they manage to get both their icon on your start screen and also run their code on your phone, which is of course a huge security and privacy hole.
1. Push notifications. Unless you were constantly checking the website, how would you know whether someone is running a poll? If it's something like "what sort of food should I eat?" I doubt the poll is open for very long.
2. Payments. Being integrated into the in-app purchase system is a much faster and smoother experience than asking for a credit card number. And some people are not going to want to enter their credit card number into a random website to vote in a poll.
> Those that wanted to get involved in the 24-year-old's dinner dilemma paid $5 (£3.50) to vote in a poll, and the majority verdict was that he should go for Korean food, so that was what he bought.
Ooh, voting with money! Now try using the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism - the results could be interesting.
Before I read the article I assumed this was the plot of the movie "Gamer" except for real. In that movie (ruined mostly by a horrible ending), players control their in game avatar but those in game avatars are real people.
A new political party whose beliefs, policy platform, speeches, and votes are tied to constantly evolving real-time demands of its app users (err...constituents)
I would vote for any candidate that committed to letting its registered users decide every vote he or she made.