It’s certainly still better than the US’s current first-past-the-post system, but it has a critical flaw where a candidate who would have won can end up losing by becoming more popular, which could be abused by people trying to “game” the voting system. In reality, something like approval or score voting would be more representative of voter’s desires.
See Nicky Case’s excellent write-up on how that can happen: https://ncase.me/ballot/
I will always upvote that ncase ballot link, it’s so well-written.
Lots of people here are arguing for Ranked Choice, but Nicky’s write-up shows that even though it’s still better than the US’s first-past-the-post system, something like Approval or Score voting are much better options.
This is a form of score voting, and the specific form you discuss is the method used to elect the members of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (although they call it “Support”, “Neutral”, and “Oppose” instead of “Upvote”, “Abstain”, and “Downvote”).
I was all-in for ranked choice voting (and even started working on an app for it) until I learned that a candidate who would have won can end up losing by becoming more popular, which is extremely counterintuitive, and a flaw that I don’t think any voting system should have.
Nicky Case wrote a fantastic explanation about how that can happen, plus exploring many other voting methods: https://ncase.me/ballot/
I still think RCV (and really anything else) would be better than the US’s first-past-the-post system, but I’d definitely prefer some type of approval, score, or STAR voting over it.
Thankfully Lemmy somewhat negates this with their ranking algorithm. “Hot” is the default for comments and “active” is the default for posts, which according to the Lemmy docs, both “Counterbalance the snowballing effect of votes over time with a logarithmic scale.”
Basically, if a newer comments gets some upvotes, but still has fewer upvotes than older comments, that new comment will still be shown near the top at first. Then after some time passes, the algorithm slowly shifts to sorting more by “raw” number of votes instead of taking time into account.
There was a big Lemmy discussion about that article 2 weeks ago too: https://lemmy.world/post/467454
I found that the “language selection” box was bugged on desktop and wouldn’t actually apply my settings, but when I tried it on a mobile browser, it worked and I no longer see really any foreign language posts.
You can double check if it worked by trying to type a post/comment and then hitting the “select language” box. If only your selected languages appear, it worked.
Approval voting has a special place in my heart because it is such an easy transition from first-past-the-post (what the U.S. uses). You literally just change the ballot from “select the candidate you like” to select the candidates (plural) you like" and you’re done, and it’s such a significant upgrade from FPTP.