On Sun, Feb 20, 2022 at 04:38:37PM +0100, Gerrit Holl wrote: > A problem with most online votes is that participation is > self-selected. There is no way to measure turnout, and therefore, it > is impossible to tell how representative the voters are for the > community at large.
I'm sure that Minecraft knows precisely how many subscribers they have. If they have a million subscribers and 999,999 votes for a feature and 1 against, I think they could probably guess that the Yes votes were representative of the community at large. Democracies deal with this all the time. Some, like Australia, have compulsory voting, and something like 95% turnout. Other democracies struggle to reach 50% turnout, with figures closer to 30% being more typical. Some democracies discourage voting, or have unequal votes. In a situation like Minecraft, where the software runs on their servers, they could (hypothetically) even weight the votes according to how many hours of game play the account has done. Or look at whether certain features were more popular among hard core gamers or casual gamers, whether votes were associated with how much money they spend, etc. Python cannot do anything like that, not even in principle. Unlike Minecraft, who can tell you precisely how many accounts there are (and make a reasonable estimate of how many unique human users are associated with each account), we can't even guess how many Python developers there are with any degree of certainty. What even counts as a Python developer? Some disinterested teen forced to learn it at school? Professional programmers? Sys admins who edit the occassional .py script? Web developers who use Python frameworks? > If voting is limited to a select group (which could be as small as > Python core developers, or as large as anyone who has ever had a pull > request merged into cpython, or something in-between), then a vote > could be a way to measure opinions after a lengthy discussion fails to > reach a consensus. Sure. But another argument is that if a lengthy discussion fails to reach a consensus, the status quo should win. https://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2011/02/status-quo-wins-stalemate.html -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/R4ZSIDXXUMBZSVXK3PGV7XWC7YJJM63K/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
