The Government's Discord server has an automatic rank system that awards points for activity, and sorts those with the highest number of points into the highest ranks. The system was called Chain of Command which made the highest ranking member the president, before it was replaced by the (more democratic) Harmonic Centrality system which (among its differences) no longer picked the president (presidential elections were held instead).

The FAQ channel explains that: "You gain points for being in voice chat with others. You don't gain points while alone. You don't gain points while deafened or muted. Streaming does not affect the points. The ranking formula is difficult to fool. At first, you can rank up by spending time with anyone. To take the top spot though, it matters more who you spend most of your time with. The formula cares more about the centrality of your relationships within the social network, not so much how many hours."

The rank channel explains that "Harmonic Centrality is a math formula that calculates 'influence' in a social network. It is impartial and fair."

Some members have tried to cheat the system by staying in the Discord voice channel while they slept, and in atleast one case tried to circumvent the AFK kicker by leaving their microphone on voice activation (hoping that it would occasionally transmit background noise, which Discord would treat as activity). Doing this is fairly obvious, and the concept of doing it to gain rank points has been mentioned in ban court cases.

A graph from April 2024:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3425310725

Jeff shared the (what he calls "rank algorithm") github links in Sept 2023:

Originally posted by Jeff:

Here is the code that calculates people's Harmonic Centrality based on their relationships.

https://github.com/j3camero/the-government/blob/main/harmonic-centrality.js

Here is the code that turns the Harmonic Centrality scores into discrete ranks.

https://github.com/j3camero/the-government/blob/main/rank.js

Here are the definitions of the ranks. Defines colors, insignia, roles, and how many members can occupy each rank.

https://github.com/j3camero/the-government/blob/main/rank-definitions.js

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