Howdy fellow formerredditconspirators!
I'm sure most of you are here either because of the SLC thing or some other relevant mishap on Reddit. Well I myself have been here for almost two weeks so let me tell you why Voat is that much better than Reddit.
NOTE: If you aren't a newbie to voat most of this is old news to you, so you can probably skip it.
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Most of you have probably already noticed that you can't upvoat (yes it's pronounced "vote", not "voh-at") things too often yet. This was specifically done by the voat administrators to prevent external voat brigading. Unlike Reddit's captha though it's site-wide and not tied to a specific subvoat.
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This is important: nothing is censored here. Reddit banned the SLC stuff for bullshit reasons, but voat doesn't do that. This is mostly because one of Voat's official non-censorship policy. There isn't really anything preventing subvoat moderators from removing stuff, but top-level admins probably won't even remove any post.
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Voat listens to you. Surprisingly so. The community manager/offical God of Voat or whatever is Atko (random shoutout: you can use /u/ or @ to summon users) and he is very good at listening to and becoming involved in the communities his site hosts. If you have a problem that concerns the site, he'll probably help you.
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Voat is public. Very much so. Remember the backlash when Reddit got rid of the vote identifiers in RES? Built in to Voat (hence the 0|0 next to every comment). Hell there's even anonymous subvoats, like /v/anon, where voting is disabled so you can't brigade even if you wanted to. So secret stuff like r/worldnews's typical "delete then repost" tactic of censorship probably wouldn't happen here at voat. And we can always coup bad mods if we want to.
And last but not least:
- Voat is small. Extremely so. The site is like two years old now or something but is still smaller as a whole than some of the bigger subreddits. There's no real chance of "mob opinions" here, nor are there any populist trends simply because there just isn't the population to support that. Throw in the fact that you can't downvoat until you have a 100 comment IKR and you end up with a totally open forum - something Reddit is not.
TLDR: Voat is everything you wanted Reddit to be and also everything Reddit didn't want Reddit to be. It isn't a reddit copy, it's a reddit improvement in every aspect. On r/conspiricy, the mods/admins were our enemies. Here, they're our coposters, covoaters, and (usually) our friends.
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Proper ago
I'm pretty interested to see where this site goes in the future. I wonder how your last point might change if this site picks up steam and the population grows.
Gamerdog6482 ago
Well, that's definitely a possibility and one we should be aware of, but Voat is built from the ground up to prevent that kind of stuff from happening. I mean I suppose it's kind of inevitable if Reddit collapses, but Voat's trying its hardest to not become reddit. Take downvoating, for example. You can't downvoat someone until you have 100 IKP. You don't automatically upvoat your own comments like you do on reddit, so that basically translates to having to have people upvoat your comments one hundred times. It would look kinda suspicious if a corporation tried to astroturf voat by mass upvoating their shill accounts - something that would either take months to accompolish or look very very strange.
Proper ago
That is going to be huge I think. I wonder if individual subverses can increase the number upvoates you need before you can voat in their subverse.
We all saw the lengths that people would go to in order to manipulate votes, discussions, and perceptions on reddit. When I signed up I noticed this place already has a conspiratard subverse. I can definately see these people upvoating each other, with alt accounts too, just to manipulate everything again.
I'm optimistic too, I just think it's going to take a bit of vigilance and hard work.