General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Should Democratic Underground switch to seven-person juries? [View all]MADem
(135,425 posts)jury half that size should be good enough for the virtual world.
And not all trial juries have to be unanimous, either.
It's not broken, Skinner. It doesn't need to be fixed. It's a great system as is. Sure, some posts might survive that would have not, but erring on the side of speech is not the end of the world. And those "misfires" of which you speak? People just might take those personally, if they start happening more often, and they might be less incentivized to continue participating here. Right now, you've said we don't have problems with "swarming," but if people start getting emboldened by successful alerts, we might see more of that. The danger there is that the range of voices here would get more narrow. I like the Big Tent aspect of DU, even though I don't always agree with my fellow DUers on every issue. I wouldn't want to see the focus narrowed.
I don't believe that anyone is truly demotivated to alert. They're simply annoyed because their alerts fail. Of course, adding the extra juror makes "Shut Out" votes, where the alerter's ability to alert is suspended for a day, less likely, too, I should imagine.
I think if people want their alerts to succeed, they need to be very clear in their alert verbiage. Many times I have served on juries where the alerter couldn't even be bothered to write a simple sentence about what was bothersome.
It's also always possible to simply tell a person how one feels about their post, if the alert fails (or even if one isn't attempted). The "jury system" isn't the only way to express disapproval. As it is, MIRT tosses out a lot of trolls and socks who have served on juries, and of course those people would be voting to disrupt, not to aid the system--maybe you should institute a hundred, five hundred or thousand post minimum before a person can serve on a jury--perhaps that might make a difference, and reduce the number of 3-3 results?
Good luck whatever you decide!