In defense of the Revolution!

Yesterday I had a long conversation with Dotctor in guild chat. I didn't quite understand the argument he was trying to build, but I'll do my best to represent his main concerns as fairly as I can here:

- I, as the guildleader, am not active enough in the guild. "You don't care."
- I let 'stupid' votes pass in the guild (namely the bank tab mentioned earlier), and I should block them.
- Democracy is a small elected group of smart people making all the decisions for everyone else, because voters don't know enough about policy

I tried to state my rebuttals, to wit:

- I, as the mechanism for democracy, had better NOT be too active in the guild because it would open me up to more bias. I should just make sure the system runs the way it should. And if anyone cares.. ah hell, I'm not even going to address that.
- Well, if I didn't, that would kind of defeat the whole point!
- That's a representative democracy. We're a direct democracy. Of course, should it evolve into a representative system, I'm not stopping that, but I'm not encouraging it either.

It didn't really seem to stick. But one thing did stick. I told him if he wants a representative democracy he could make a vote for it. Instead of that, he made this Vote today:

By the time I found out, a real life friend of mine and someone who cares a lot for the guild had already started to campaign against this vote, and I must admit I campaigned myself, too! (so much for the impartial researcher)

It turned out most people voting only voted because dotctor told them so. Some didn't understand the mechanism. Others responded to what I'd say were campaign promises of a more clear guild structure.

There's a whole lot of stuff happening here. Next to my own instinctive defensive reaction (while staying within the rules of the system), there's people who seem to be doing potentially damaging stuff just because someone told them to while they don't know what they're doing. There were also players who responded to promises without actually reading or at least understanding what the vote means.

That's certainly the point he's trying to prove there.

Nevertheless, his vote failed quite spectacularly, so I guess there's something to be said for our approach as well.