A P2P [1] social media swarm where identities are signed pseudoanonymous hashes optionally tied to identity proofs. Reputation can be gained in the peer and interest graphs.

Advertisers and attention seekers can still exist in such a system without being obtrusive - they can flag their messages by signing them with proof that they burned funds contributing to a charity (or deposited funds to my personal inbox). Eg., "this message from xyz recruiter deposited $1 in your account - read?", or "this MrBeast video provably donated $1M to the EFF - watch?"

Journalists can make money on the graph by soliciting donors or publishing content to certain nodes early for a fee.

[1] not federated, apart from proxy publishing or relay nodes

And they tell us that revenue growth is organic. When Google was new, you didn't need a single ad.

This concept is far more popular now than it might ever have been in the 1990s. Look at Discord.

But if we interpreted the headline as if the article was actually about the idea: I do think there is an interesting idea (which I first read in Byung-Chul Han‘a The Transparency Society) which is that trust and transparency are functionally opposites. We tend to treat transparency as an automatically good thing in democratic systems, but I think you can make the argument that the call for transparency only comes after trust has already been lost.

So it’s not really a solution to a more democratic system that results in more trust between constituents and representatives, but rather just a way to deal with the loss of trust in an ostensibly practical way.

We certainly need a more P2P, version of this type of platform and a way to fund and scale it such that it can’t be messed with by billionaire hacks.

The odds of this being wildly successful are pretty slim, I’d say…

The solution is the same as it has always been, stop spending time and money on things that are frustrating. If enough people do it in aggregate, then things will change; but I'll be damned if people aren't slow to catch on.

National democracy is built on top of local democracy, in the sense of local self-rule -- if local democracy is dying then national democracy will tend to die, but if local democracy is thriving, national democracy is largely guaranteed.

About local democracy:

1. Local city government is now less accountable because of the death of local newspapers. The public must have some idea what politicians are doing, but without local newspapers there is no one to report what is happening at the local level.

2. This is related to people (since the 1960s) losing interest in local government. When I was a child my parents both served in the local government, I remember being 7 years old and getting taken to meetings where the room was packed. But when I was 42 I drove my mom to a town meeting and I was shocked to see that the room was empty, literally, there was not a single citizen who had come out for the meeting that evening. The only people in the room were the politicians (all of whom were volunteers, as it was an unpaid position -- they were civically minded citizens).

3. Local democracy worked best when families stayed in one town for generations, and so had a long-term commitment to the health of the town. But the modern life-style, even for the middle class who are the most likely to serve in government, involves buying a starter home in one town, then a bigger home for a family (in another town), then a retirement home, possibly in another state. Most families now assume they will only be in a given town for 10 or 20 years, so their focus tends to be on minimal taxes, rather than long-term investments in the town.

4. For local government, possible solutions include abolishing local democracy and making the positions appointed (most roles are already appointed, of course) from the state level, or making the towns much larger (a large percentage of a given state) or limiting voting to those who pass some test, or who demonstrate citizenship by volunteering some time, or by having frequent elections to a staggered city council (as frequent voting tends to reward the few citizens who are highly active).

Anyone who thinks these moves are anti-democratic should remember that local government elections tend to only get 15% to 20% participation rates, so most of the public has already voluntarily disenfranchised itself.

Any democracy will automatically be the democracy of those who show up. There is no democracy for the truly apathetic. But local and regional self-rule can remain strong so long as citizens who are active in civic affairs can continue to exercise rule at the local level, without being blocked those who are non-active.

There remains a controversy whether "democracy" means "the right to vote" or "a population engaged in self-government." That is, does "democracy" refer to "self expression via voting" or does it refer to actual government arising from the local population? Those who feel that "democracy" means "self expression" tend to think of themselves as consumers rather than citizens, they see themselves as buying government services (with taxes) rather than the producers of government. But local self-rule does not survive for long in areas where people see themselves mostly as consumers of government services. Local self-rule survives thanks to the civically minded citizens who are willing to volunteer their time to creating governance.