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Comment by throwaway1892 | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the barrier to contribution aims to act as a filter against poor/troll contributions.

Also the necessary skills to submit a book overlap a lot with the skills of the people who might be interested.

Really interesting to reflect on the fact that a lower barrier of entry is not always equal to a better choice. There could be a lot of philosophy around this subject, leading us to: should voting be constrained by technology or knowledge of some sort? Is the action motivated by knowledge better to the uninformed one? Sorry for all this off-topic but it is kinda related. I would really love to hear your opinions on this, thanks.

I would love the Ballot having a second row with ten multiple-choice questions about politics, the economy and the world.

Vote gets multiplied with the number of correct answers. Everyone wins.

Interesting, but choosing unbiased questions will be a ballet in itself..

Edit: A ballot in itself, although a ballet in itself also works...

I think this is a really bad/scary idea. A great thing about democracy is that _everyone_ has a voice.

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. In school we were taught a great deal of the Civil Rights movement, as much of it happened in our city and state. In particular, this "test" suggestion makes me recall the literacy tests [1] instituted in the Jim Crow south.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

No. If unreasonable limits are put on voting, people will find other, more destructive ways to "vote". Every government is eventually a democracy, in the sense that if you rule against your citizens' wishes for long enough and they aren't allowed to vote, they will try to kill you or overthrow you. It just isn't very practical to rule without the consent of the governed.

> Is the action motivated by knowledge better to the uninformed one?

Well yes, obviously, but it's better to try to force people to be informed than to ignore them. As you may have noticed, people don't like being ignored.

And what would happen if the ones in power are the first interested in having misinformed population so achieving power is easier for them in the end?

Adding any kind of discrimination to an election process (which is a right and has to be open to all) is not a good idea, since it opens the way to all sort of abuse (see the comment on literacy tests), in the way it is evaluated. I don't see a way for such a test to exist, without any bias that could create discrimination.

And even if people are informed, it does not mean they would chose according to that knowledge, since I think a lot of people vote not according to their brain, but follow their emotions or the expectations of their social group.

For while, to submit a book must be via GithubPR, but I will work to add a simple google form, to moderate all books in the future.

This is a fair point, and one that I hadn't considered.

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