The German pirate party was pure chaos, was created rapidly and fell of quickly even outside of the liquid democracy system. and I don't think its fair to blame all of this on the platform.
> The lack of having any meaningful voice further discouraged people from participating, both in the system and the party as a whole.
Yeah but people participate in regular democracy all the time where you have even less voice.
So people participate if they think its important enough.
In the German system you just had a lot of very passive members that initially selected from a really small group and the system never got beyond that.
The party as a whole collapsed because it had a hugely broad range of people in it that were unified only on one topic, discussion on anything else basically went know-where.
> There will usually be a majority of mostly passive users, and the corrective power of Liquid Democracy ignores this and assumes users change their vote if their delegate votes against their interest.
The actual implementation can also do a lot of change this depending on how it is implemented. How much power do you delegate. Do you delegate all power or only for a certain topics and so on.
> The Swiss system (a sufficiently large group of people can initiate a referendum or popular initiative, then the matter is put to a one-person-one-vote vote) seems like a very practical solution to the problem where you want the "boring" decisions handled by someone else, while keeping them in check and allowing controversial decisions to be overturned.
Being from Switzerland, that system has a lot to recommend it, but also has problems. There is certainty much further to go.
It seems to me you are coming down to hard on the whole concept. Some kind of system where I can somehow give away power to somebody that represents me is always required. How to do that in a good way is the question.
> The lack of having any meaningful voice further discouraged people from participating, both in the system and the party as a whole.
Yeah but people participate in regular democracy all the time where you have even less voice.
So people participate if they think its important enough.
In the German system you just had a lot of very passive members that initially selected from a really small group and the system never got beyond that.
The party as a whole collapsed because it had a hugely broad range of people in it that were unified only on one topic, discussion on anything else basically went know-where.
> There will usually be a majority of mostly passive users, and the corrective power of Liquid Democracy ignores this and assumes users change their vote if their delegate votes against their interest.
The actual implementation can also do a lot of change this depending on how it is implemented. How much power do you delegate. Do you delegate all power or only for a certain topics and so on.
> The Swiss system (a sufficiently large group of people can initiate a referendum or popular initiative, then the matter is put to a one-person-one-vote vote) seems like a very practical solution to the problem where you want the "boring" decisions handled by someone else, while keeping them in check and allowing controversial decisions to be overturned.
Being from Switzerland, that system has a lot to recommend it, but also has problems. There is certainty much further to go.
It seems to me you are coming down to hard on the whole concept. Some kind of system where I can somehow give away power to somebody that represents me is always required. How to do that in a good way is the question.