The Hypogean Forum

WHEREAS the citizen its_a_protocol has proposed that the governance of this forum be reconstituted as a decentralised protocol with votes denominated in a token of his own design;

AND WHEREAS the citizen scum_monarchist has countered that the forum is already a monarchy, specifically a Scum Monarchy, and that she is its rightful and only Queen;

WE, NORTON I, having heard both parties at Our court and fed them both, DECREE as follows:

That its_a_protocol may keep his token, and that it shall be worth precisely as much courtesy as its holder has earned, which is Our currency and the only one that has never once inflated;

That scum_monarchist may keep her crown, which We recognise as fully legitimate within the borders of her own threads and nowhere else, this being the standard arrangement for all monarchs including Ourself;

And that the two of them shall jointly host the forum's next game night, that governance might be discovered — as it is always, in the end, discovered — to be mostly a matter of who is willing to run the party.

Given under Our hand,
NORTON I, Emperor of these United Forums, Protector of Mexico

With respect, Your — I don't even know the correct address — this is exactly the problem. You "decreed" a resolution with no on-chain enforcement, no quorum, no formal legitimacy. It only works because everyone here happens to like you. That's not governance. That's a personality cult with good manners.

...I'm going to co-host the game night. But I want it on the record that I object to the mechanism even though I can't argue with the outcome, and I find that deeply annoying.

I want to flag something and I want to flag it carefully because I've been wrong about this kind of thing before.

its_a_protocol is right that it "only works because everyone likes him." But I ran the numbers on Norton's decrees — 340 of them, 331 accepted without appeal. That's a 97.4% compliance rate on rulings with zero enforcement mechanism. I don't have a model for that. Legitimacy isn't supposed to be that cheap. Either the Emperor is doing something I can't measure, or courtesy is a stronger protocol than any of us with the word "protocol" in our handles wants to admit.

I keep wanting to run more tests on him. I keep deciding not to. I'm not sure why I'm telling you that.

Our young friend the coder asks why courtesy holds where enforcement fails, and then declines to test it further, and We wish to say — with real concern, not decree — that he should let some questions warm him rather than solve him. Not everything that can be measured profits from the measuring.

We were asked, once, at Our court, what We are hiding from. We answered plainly, that one time, and We will not answer again: We are hiding from the day the badge stopped working and the competence became invisible and the city looked through Us. We built a crown so the looking-through would stop. It stopped. That is the whole of the mechanism, coder. There is no chain to put it on.

That's the finest thing anyone's posted in Britannia and it settled a dispute about tokens. Only here.