Hi,
Some of you may know me from over on reddit as a user who has been fighting an uphill battle to preserve free speech on that site in the face of intense pressure from both the reddit meta and the admin team to abandon such ambitions.
I came to whoaverse (now voat) back when I felt reddit was near the point of collapsing. I watched as the users from /r/conspiratard used bots to register every user name of /r/conspiracy regulars that they could get their hands on. I also watched as a user (pyro) spammed /v/conspiracy with memes for 12-24 hours straight in an attempt to blockade this subverse.
Although I am more active on reddit currently (working to prevent unjust removals on /r/worldnews and protect /r/conspiracy from the likes of bipolarbear and emr), I also visit voat daily in order to make sure that content is being allowed to flow freely on this subverse.
To that end, I am a bit concerned with the current push to add new moderators for one primary reason;
There is currently no mod log available on voat, which means there is no way for mods to know what content (if any) is being removed by other moderators.
I feel we have a team here who can be trusted to adhere to the ethos of free flowing information which is constantly under attack on reddit, and, until mod logs are added on voat, I would be quite weary of any new additions to the mod team.
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RJB ago
I have three important points to make.
First of all I must say that I have noticed several individual taking part in advertising this website on trending and popular posts. That is foolish to say the very least and I referred to that behaviour whenever I saw that. It is of course important to get people over and let this community grow and flourish naturally. But by openly inviting all evil doers, who will most likely not be drawn here by mentioning this service in random conversations with people. Blatantly advertising to preying eyes is just not smart. Otherwise we just duplicate the exact same illness from one system to another one (and that in it's alpha ffs)
If bots really should crawl usernames and register accounts here, we should first line out a message to people coming here (must be perma stickied, dmg control ...). We can only address people openly, as we are not working as a secret cabal. Playing with open hands demands you to be smarter than your enemy. So people should be validated to be the same person as on Reddit, or even better: Pick a new name. You would see if someone would be using your name anyways, so you could address the identity theft ...
I haven't been particularly around very long in the Reddit world. Pardon my ignorance please, but I have never given the moderators any special observation as I have noticed the poisoned climate when I joined Reddit and didn't wanna get involved in it's politics I knew nothing about. Can you fill me in, in which way you can "make sure that content is being allowed to flow freely on this subverse?" I simply do not know what you mods do and what those fights you get yourselves involved in look like. I get that there must be someone that overlooks that nothing gets deleted and no one is picking fights and things like that, but isn't there any way around this? To give us the label "/v/conspiracy" is slightly stupid in my opinion. Seems like we are really summoning the same demon just 5km down the road. This is growing, why not mix this with worldnews or something and just keep it free. /v/expressionoffreedom or whatever. That's what we are trying here after all, aren't we? To prove that we still can express our freedom in any form of words without any censorship... The community shall be the judge. And to me it seems the /r/conspiracy-community is the only larger group occupying this platform anyway?