On 2024-07-24 23:04, Rob Lanphier via Election-software wrote:
Hi folks,
I've just let a few folks join earlier this afternoon. I had accidentally had the settings too restrictive, but hopefully, it's a bit easier to subscribe now, and my personal button mashing isn't a hurdle to subscription. I'm really happy with how the membership of this mailing list is shaping up, since I know most of you (at least, I know your online presence), and I'm reasonably sure that most of y'all have both programming chops and voting science chops, which is the exact set of folks that I was hoping to see. Please: invite your friends!
Perhaps posting something on Reddit's endfptp or votingtheory could encourage people to join; I think they're somewhat more simulation-focused than people on the EM list, or at least that's been my impression. has the There may be other forums too; I think CES has one? And there's https://www.votingtheory.org/, though I think it might be kinda dead.
Also, I'm hoping y'all can all give some advice on moderation policy here. Over at the election-methods list, there were a couple of folks that became very unpopular over the past few months. I won't go into details, but at least one of them left in a huff because I sent them a private email that they found disagreeable (or rather, they want to unsubscribe, but also seem to want white-glove service on a self-service mailing list). Then the other problematic member complained on-list about my private email. It's a little emotionally taxing on me to have to send behavioral emails to members (letting them know just how unpopular they are), and thus, I like mathematical rules for this type of thing.
The way it usually goes (on forums where I've been posting/lurking at least) is that someone lets the admin know if someone else is making trouble, and then the admin looks at things and decides whether to do something about it.
Maybe it would feel less taxing if you had some intermediate measures, like temporary bans or cooldown periods instead of the only choice being either letting them continue or kicking them out.
But if it's writing behavioral mails of any kind that's taxing, then that wouldn't help, of course. In that case, there's another problem. If the votes are public, then the voters might not want to be the ones pointing the finger at anyone either.
But if the votes *aren't* public, then someone would still have to look at the private votes and say "you're unpopular because x people think you're making a mess of the list". You'd still have to write a behavioral mail, it would just be "I can kick you off the list since x people think you're being obnoxious" instead of "I can kick you off the list since I heard some people complain and I think they're right". I'm not sure how much that would buy you.
My question: assuming this list doesn't lurk in obscurity forever, on the undesirable but probably inevitable occasion that we have a problematic member of the list (or two, or three, or five people who don't play nice with one another), what should we do about it?
The informal way would be: have people who object send you mail, then you make a judgement call.
If you're going to do a vote of no confidence instead, my idea would be something like:
If someone complains to you about a user, ask the list to send you their F candidates. If a candidate gets enough Fs, kick him (or do some temporary measure).
While it's nice to know who the A and C users are, it's not really relevant to a no confidence vote.
I still think the informal method is better, though :-)
-km