Direct Democracy Debate

This sounds like a problem that 'real democracy' or 'direct democracy' pretty much diesnt have.

Not everyone thinks that direct democracy is a good system.

Maybe because current "democracies" are much more "republics" than democracies - i.e. the people vote once every 4 years or so for someone, and then all of the decisions are taken by those people, and not "democratically" by the population.It's not like our governments are run HN/Reddit style right now. Maybe they should be, but they aren't - far from it.

To simplify a little, in a democracy, if 51% of voters are "backwards" in some way ... that group will be making the decisions for 100% of residents.This is the big problem with a "pure" direct democracy: you automatically get tyranny of the majority.Most of our real world democracies suffer worse problems than this, though. The leadership elected to make the decisions may not even enjoy a majority of popular support. Even having had popular support at an electio

Pure democracy doesn't necessarily scale, which is why we elect representatives and have electoral colleges and such in real life. Maybe HN's reached the point where a pure vote system is not enough.

You could say our representative "democracy" is a little too indirect.

Perhaps you are looking for a direct democracy, where citizens would take on the responsibility of the legislative branch and vote on each and every bill. I think there is a good reason why direct democracy doesn't work except on the smallest of scales.I wouldn't want to live in a society where all of our rules and laws are determined by popular vote. That is a tyranny of the majority. With all due respects to Thomas Paine, just because a majority believe something to be true does n

Direct democracy is impractical in XXI century. Very often the good and the needed policies are complicated and counter-intuitive, and majority of citizen is simply not qualified enough to make a reasonable decision.We need to fix representative democracy instead, and indeed there are tools for that. We need to be able to delegate the decision making in different fields to different people (for example, on civil rights to a liberal, on military to a conservative and on environmental policy to

Democracy means rule by the people. When you elect leaders, you're not ruling - you're choosing who rules.I don't think people are questioning the merits of democracy. I think people are questioning whether the US truly is a democracy.I'd love to see a shift from voting on leaders to voting on laws and projects. The idea that one person could represent hundreds of millions seems impossible to me.Participatory Budgeting [0] is truly democratic. Citizens get to vote on

It is a mistake to call the form of representative government used today "democracy". The system is designed in such a way as to keep the influence of ordinary people, who are not heavily invested in the system, very minimal. Usually this is done by parties promising rather different things before elections, but afterwards coming to some agreement and doing something unrelated to the promises. Now that there are new ways to organize via social media, people can behave in unexpected way