On Clickbate (Voat)

submitted ago by PuttItOut

I came across this submission posted by my great pal Theo (actually I wouldn't trust him around sharp objects, but that's just me) and it was such a clickbate title! I was expecting him roast me for posting poetry to Voat.

I was ready to laugh.

I didn't laugh. It wasn't funny, it was concern fagging about my credibility, mental state, and casting doubt about Voat and who we partnered with. I hate clickbate.

If you filter down the list of demands you get to the important stuff. This is some of it. I've said this before, and will one last time.

Why would anyone invest in Voat?

  1. They believe Free Speech is important
  2. They see a lot of potential in Voat

They aren't selling ads, so obviously they are selling us out.

  1. Voat data has never been shared with anyone, and will remain this way.

How is Voat ever going to make money?

We realized years ago that advertising was a dead end. At best it would possibly cover hosting costs. It is sad in a way, because we could get some advertising, but we can't expect Voat to change. If I said "Hey guys, we can get some advertisement money if we clean up the defaults a bit," how would that end? Basically we can't advertise here because of the content. It's that bad.

  1. We have a new feature set coming out soon that will allow Voat to generate revenue in fun and different ways. We are going to move in this direction and build out revenue capability on top of it.

  2. Additionally, while developing some prototype features, we realized that we could use the software for a different purpose, potentially opening up an entirely new market separate from Voat (no Voat wouldn't change). So we are working to this end too.

Who is The Angel?

I'm not saying, because it's unimportant. I have controlling interest in Voat. The Angel is a silent partner and does not get involved with the running of Voat. Maybe they should because it takes a ton of time and they might be better than me. ;)

Short of it is:

If you don't trust me you should leave Voat, it's what I did with Reddit. That's honestly my best advice.

What I didn't do when I left Reddit was make a bunch of destructive posts about how much I didn't trust them. You know, to go along with that builder/destroyer theme we have going.

 

Another sticky? Who is this power mod!?

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virge ago

User X either abused a new user or targetted someone because they said something you disagreed with one time and then immediately went to their profile page and went to every other topic unrelated to the conversation they disagreed with and downvoated those, too - with complete disregard to the concent. The user was then banned.

User X is not trying to be constructive and agree to the rules that make up your access to participate. Probably means you don't belong here if you're unwilling to follow very simple and basic no-nonsense rules for brigading that are destructive to the community.

P.S User X may have an diagnosed mental disorder if they believe this type of behavior is acceptible.

Sburban_Shitposter ago

who cares about internet points. Go through my history, fuck up my karma, who cares. I don’t want anyone getting banned for anything other than illegal content.

virge ago

So there are people who abuse the voting system. Let me borrow from another thread: https://voat.co/v/Voat/3242551/18835950/10#18835950

You absolutely can look at each post you see naturally in your experience using Voat by Aged and downvoat it, if you are so inclined.

You cannot get bored once or twice a week (or, whatever, I'm illustrating for the sake of expedience) and click on Aged's user profile, systematically finding each of his recent posts at every place he posts them including the ones you would never have seen because you do not participate in the community, and then proceed to downvoat all of those in an intentional assault on his whole posting experience.

This is a thing. There are people that do this. The immediate response to your absolute line in the sand of "ban for illegal or no ban" is, so what would YOU do about these people - if they are shrinking the community by running off new users or making it so comments in areas where they normally wouldn't be downvoated into oblivion for any post just because they're being sniped by someone with a vendetta and free time on their hands? Lets find some common ground to this problem.

Sburban_Shitposter ago

if somebody is constantly clicking on the same profile and downvoting one person continuously, then just give the person a cooldown on voting for a while and then repeat it but longer if they keep abusing it. I don’t want anybody banned off of voat for just clicking arrows in an incorrect way.

virge ago

Ok. Great. I agree. I think there should be zero automated bans - I think a warning, then if no appeal to the warning for investigation the second time a list that is manually reviewed so anything that stands out as "beyond baud" can be investigated before pushing the button. For all I know, and if I were to guess, this or similar may already be in practice.

With that said, I strongly advocate for some changes. One of those changes would be that this ban has an appeal process - it could be something as simple as you being able to reply to the ban message to begin an appeal. This would further increase accuracy, but would need to be balanced with communication and transparency.

Transparency seems to be one of the operative issues here, from both sides. I have some ideas about that.