[Maultasche]

Have everyone empowered to dispense justice is an interesting proposition, but there's a big difference between insects and people.

People aren't all logical, analytic creatures, especially when they operate in groups. They tend to act on emotion rather than logic and it often isn't clear which information is factual and which is rumor. People tend to be susceptible to groupthink, and often go with the crowd.

Having everyone dealing out justice might work if everyone was calm, rational, logical, and well-educated, which is often what game theory supposes, but that's not how things work. In reality, I would think that such a system would result in mob violence, sometimes triggered by good information, but often triggered by hearsay and rumors.

Not everyone agrees what is correct behavior and what isn't, so what would be acceptable to one person would not be acceptable to another. We'd get a lot of uncertainty whether our behavior is acceptable or not.

If we had a system where a mass of people decided via some sort of upvoting/downvoting, it would be a "tyranny of the majority", where minorities would be oppressed by majorities just because they had different standards of what is acceptable behavior. Goodbye civil rights, because those would count for nothing if a member of the minority did something that offended the majority.

It seems to me that this is what happens in anarchical places in the world where authority has broken down. Anyone can and will dispense justice. Violence because someone was offended by someone else's behavior (which I find completely non-offensive) is common and mob violence is common.

Strong authority often breeds corruption but a lack of authority can also breed disorder and chaos, an environment where people who can gather followers become a strong authority and become corrupt. It's bad either way.

[DennisP]

You wouldn't want to legalize lynch mobs. But maybe there's a happy medium. Making it clear that citizens are allowed to take videos of cops might be a good start.

For actual punishment, force isn't necessarily needed. A lot of societies manage it by social pressure, with "shunning" being an extreme version. Pressure for conformity already exists regarding things which are not illegal, so I'm not convinced that it makes things worse to rely on it more for things which are currently illegal.

One of my anthropology professors used to say there are two ways to keep order in society: by force, and by ideology, and the second is a lot cheaper.

[sliverstorm]

It's rare but you can perform a citizen's arrest

[amalcon]

It's also actively discouraged by the police for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons are even good: chain of custody concerns for any evidence on the suspect's person, danger to the untrained person making the arrest, danger to the suspect, and the possibility that the suspect will sue.

[drzaiusapelord]

> I would think that such a system would result in mob violence, sometimes triggered by good information, but often triggered by hearsay and rumors.

We are already seeing this with the "reddit affect" where some poor soul gets targeted by "Hey this guy didn't tip me on a busy Friday night," and it all turns out to be bullshit. Even if it wasn't, thousands of angry netizens shouldn't be picking on lone individuals.

There's also an element of bikeshedding here as an average Joe can understand being stiffed and be unreasonably angry about it, but perhaps cannot understand the intricacies of sexual assault or financial fraud. This is why police, lawmakers, prosecutors, lawyers, and judges are all trained, educated, and regulated in some fashion. This stuff is much harder than it looks. Anyone who has ever lived in a HOA knows exactly what happens when average Joes are given the authority to enforce random things. Its death by a million paper cuts and everyone is miserable and hates each other in the end.

We tried the snitch society in communist regimes (and still have it in places like Cuba and N Korea) and its hellish.

>Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included."

Except the police have a powerful union behind them. 100 reports against me will lead to my arrest or a beating or whatever. 100 against a cop will merit nothing, maybe a rubber-stamped investigation that always leads to 'innocent.'

[spcoll]

> In reality, I would think that such a system would result in mob violence, sometimes triggered by good information, but often triggered by hearsay and rumors.

Basically what you see today on social media, where everyone is empowered to be an agent of "justice" (a public shaming and harassment-based justice system).

[backtoyoujim]

The Scarlet Twitter.

[yellowapple]

The Facebookrucible.

[gdrulia]

>Not everyone agrees what is correct behavior and what isn't, so what would be acceptable to one person would not be acceptable to another.

That!

If there would be one set of rules that everyone would agree, then this idea could work. It works in ants, because there is no ambiguous ideas of what is right and what is wrong.

You could think that law suppose to be that set of rules that suppose to tell you what is right and what is wrong. But is not that simple, law doesn't ask you whether you agree with it, you just must comply with it. So if you disagree that listening to pirated mp3 is a unlawful, you might as well do it without feeling guilt. And even when law is already forced upon you, disputes still arise and disagreements has to be solved in court, simply because you cannot cover every possible situation in the rules.

[javajosh]

>If we had a system where a mass of people decided via some sort of upvoting/downvoting, it would be a "tyranny of the majority", where minorities would be oppressed...

Maybe. But isn't it an experiment worth trying? Does anyone really know what would happen in a modern, secular, money-driven society if you gave people more authority to enforce the law?

[a_c_s]

This happens in cyberspace all the time (just look at any HN discussion about airport security): what reason do we have to believe that in meatspace people would behave differently?

[TeMPOraL]

Moreover, why do we think that this process would happen in meatspace? Distinction between on-line and off-line is getting increasingly meaningless anyway. People now mostly communicate on-line, mostly get their news on-line, so it stands to reason they'd behave exactly as they do now, only with worse consequences.

[gertef]

People behave very differently online and offline

[pixl97]

No, not exactly. People behave differently when they believe there will be consequences for their actions. I may troll because there is almost zero repercussions to the action online. You see the same action in large crowds. A few people in a large crowd can easily start a riot by realizing their individual actions are not likely to be punished.

[Maultasche]

I do think it's an experiment worth trying. My hypothesis would be that it wouldn't work, but it would be indeed interesting to see what happens. I think that we'd learn a lot even from failure.

I suspect it would have a greater chance of being successful on a small scale and then break down on a large scale. Like corruption, I think it's somewhat dependent on the culture shared by the people who are involved, much like with successful companies vs disfunctional companies.

[bayesianhorse]

One of the key points is that abusive "punishing" is in itself punished.

To get the best of both worlds, it would be good enough to make sure citizens are empowered to investigate and persecute abuse. Both through strong "rat squads" and good systems for reporting abuse.

[_lce0]

> If we had a system where a mass of people decided via some sort of upvoting/downvoting, it would be a "tyranny of the majority", where minorities would be oppressed...

I feel like, in tech, we have a bunch of those