PEperryprog·Nov 29, 2017
This sort of reminded me of ChaosBot [0], something that sounds like what could be a total disaster, ended up being really neat.
https://github.com/Chaosthebot/Chaos
In Hello, world: this is WikiTribuneChaosthebot
Chaos
Python2017–2020
Chaosthebot / Chaos
Chaos
A social coding experiment that updates its own code democratically.
8Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.4KGitHub stars
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What it is
A social coding experiment that updates its own code democratically.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-05-23 04:35:18 UTC to 2020-04-27 01:03:47 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 3 | 5 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesChaosthebot:A social coding experiment that updates its own code democratically
1 points · Open discussionBut how does this work in practice? I could (theoretically) create 5000 github accounts and have full control over the repo in one month [1].
This means I could create a pull requests which gives my main account absolute voting rights unless other real people try to organize over 5000 accounts to vote no. While this can happen in the real world as well (just look at Turkey), it is quite hard to achieve (you first need enough people to support you that you can gain such power).
In the internet, creating accounts is pretty easy and unless github flags my accounts (which can always be circumvented), there is no real democracy just like with Bitcoin when the most determined/resourceful person has the most power. That's because they either managed to create enough accounts, or in bitcoins case, have custom hardware to control the creation of b
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itcoins as well as (almost) all transactions.
While the idea is pretty interesting to do that automatically, a better approach IMO is to have humans decide what to implement and what not because humans tend to be able to spot fake votes when there is no meaningful discussion why something should be changed. And thanks to the wonderful nature of free software, if a maintainer starts to prioritize their own agenda over the community, the community tends to just fork the repo and do their own thing. This is the best example of democracy I have seen so far. People are able to discuses what they want to do and if they fell their interests are no longer supported, they can just do their own and bring other over if they feel the same way.
[1]: the current minimum age is 1 month according to https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/blob/master/settings.py#L3...
https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/pull/48 "Need more chaos" proposes this.
In A social coding experiment that updates its own code democraticallyDiscarding votes after `rebase` commits looks like a pretty bad problem now: https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/pull/26
In A social coding experiment that updates its own code democraticallyLooks like there's a revolution going on already https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/pull/42
In A social coding experiment that updates its own code democraticallyA social coding experiment that updates its own code democratically
125 points · Open discussionShow HN: A social coding experiment that automatically merges pull requests
3 points · Open discussion