Even with no new laws, most countries still have non-automatic decisions to be made just as part of the structure.

If you politician bastards would just stick to your promises, I'd vote for you.

You'd be surprised, but there are numerous governments that claim to be democratic - while having a much weaker claim to democracy than "the current acting prime minister was elected by 8000 unverified randos in a snap election online".

Outside the comfy first world, the bar for government sanity can get extremely low.

It wasn’t an election. One of the more prominent youth groups involved in the protests used Discord to organize and decide internally which leader they should endorse and suggest to the president and army leadership. No one was directly elected on Discord.

Military of Nepal want to make an agreement with the activists, rather than the Nepali.

Therefore activists need suggesting a representative of the groups. IMHO a private voting is fine in this case.

Presumably if people aren't happy about it they'll just continue to revolt.

Would that the country were as simple as electing someone because of a TV show.

As did Ukraine!

A little education would go a long way here

resulted in about 7000 prisoners escaping jail. A lot of them surrendered and were captured but It is unsafe out here in a long long time.

It's kind of ironic that a nominally communistic government doesn't believe that the people have agency to act on their own, guess it reflects their own fears. I hope Xi lies sleepless at night worrying about the Chinese people getting rid of him.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's two competing issues here:

1) You could make digital elections secure with issued digital IDs, and simply recording everyone's vote and it would be easily auditable.

But no one wants elections where (the contents of) your vote is recorded somewhere.

So 2) You use your digital ID to be able to vote once, but if you're no longer connected to your vote, it would be much more susceptible to tampering if you can't establish a double blind chain of custody of the votes, which is what expensive in person voting is doing very well.

The first option would be great if you could somehow guarantee a corruption free future of your country where no one will come after you for your vote (hint: you can't).

because there is no safe way to vote digitally

> "in some sense the most democratic thing any country has ever done"

How is one faction holding an internal vote to impose rule on the rest of the people, who have no representation, anything at all like a democracy?

Discord is a place you get randomly banned forever and that cannot be reliably linked to your real identity. It's really not a place anyone should rely on for any real world actions. (And I'm even skipping basics like transparency and future audits)

An IRC server or even a mailing list seems far better suited to the purpose than a notoriously closed and proprietary platform.

Liquid democracy is a total viable platform. But Discord is better in so far as it can be used for all kinds of things and conversations, not just for voting or debates.

Taiwan has been trying to develop web platforms explicitly for facilitating democratic decision-making. Might be something to look into.

Discord is a spectacularly bad fit for that, it was probably only used because the timetable was short and "it was there" and "everyone already had it".

> My wife and I were talking about this today and we thought it's possible that what has just happened in Nepal is at least in some sense the most democratic thing any country has ever done.

I don't see that argument at all. What was so democratic about it? Violent overthrowal of the government may sometimes be justified, but it is not an act of democracy.

I agree, but I don't know if a closed platform could ever be suitable for this.

I daydream about a open source peer reviewed system, that can process votes, control, manage government at every level through general public and open voting system. Distributing control ultimately.

Seems a bit vulnerable to subversion of the host (and/or its government) once they decide to pay attention (or even through negligence; imagine a minister being banned because of some ML false-positive).

If the format is to be sustainable, they will need to find or found a different platform.

IMO, the superflat architecture is the opposite of maximum inclusion. The luckiest kid always wins the debate. Ensuring hierarchical mobility by allowing weaker players bunch of small wins is key.

Well I discussed it with my wife and extended family. We all agreed it was a terrible idea.

Yeah, a mob is a mob. Us human beings are despicable to each other tbh.

Blockchain is well suited for this. Polymarket really proved that blockchain can be useful beyond crypto, especially when trust is at stake.