On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 9:19 AM, Anthony Ferrara <ircmax...@gmail.com> wrote: > All, > > I ran some numbers on the current votes of the dual-mode vote right > now. There were a number of voters that I didn't recognize. So I > decided to pull some stats. > ... > > Something that I think we need to discuss as a group. > > So consider that discussion open. > I think this is likely because the votes are made public during voting phase. To me, that is a bad thing. It makes for an ugly voting period. That sort of politics should happen during the discussion phase.
So I don't think there's anything wrong with "first time voters" voting No en masse here. I just think there's a major problem in having a real-time count of votes during the voting period. If votes weren't made public during the voting, then more people would vote on more issues... avoiding this situation where people come from "nowhere" to cast a vote as word gets out on blogs that something terrible is about to happen. In short, I think the real-time public vote results causes a few problems: 1) Bandwagon voting, or "vote for the winner" mindset. The early wave of voters can impact the results by discouraging people from voting. (Look at Zeev's RFC vote count vs Anthony's.) 2) The losing side feverishly drumming up votes, often with scare tactics - i.e., vocal minority. (It's much easier for the "No" side of any vote to appeal to this.) 3) In rare cases, Gaming the system - closing the vote at the exact time that benefits the owner of the RFC. So I don't think there's anything sinister here. It's just the natural result of the voting rules. -- Matthew Leverton -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
