"as a test run"

as a test run

AS A TEST RUN

FOR ANYONE PAYING ATTENTION IT'S BEEN 1.6 YEARS

AND NO ONE HAS HAD THE DISCUSSION ABOUT CREATING A MORE ROBUST ANTI-SPAM SYSTEM

IT'S JUST

RESTRICT ALL USERS MORE BECAUSE OF THE SPAM OF A FEW USERS

and it's just gotten worse, goats.

You've done nothing but ensure new users are attacked at will for having a dissenting view point from the hive mind. New users are brigaded constantly if they do not agree with common sentiment and are downvoted to oblivion, ensuring they don't get out of the pit you dug for them. They are barraged with hateful, slanderous claims of being "schills" and cannot even reply to make a defense for themselves because of your thoughtless throttling.

If you actually cared about ending spam you could work on the reporting feature of the site and allow people to REPORT SPAMMERS who are actually guilty instead of creating a system that is dirt simple to game, one which silences new users.

This is far more dishonest than anything reddit ever did. Punishing users for being new by setting up a system designed to ensure they fail isn't how you empower high quality discourse. It's how you import all of the worst of reddit and infuse it with 4chan. Congratulations.

Wow, perfect to suppress opinions of minorities. Keep up voat. this is free speech. lol

What prevents a bad user from immediately creating a new user and shitpost without limits again? This idea seem pretty senseless to me.

What would you think about instead implementing some sort of control in the listings themselves? Make Hot more aggressively bury posts with negative scores, make /all/new ignore them (and well if you're reading r/new in a sub you get what is says, all newest links, unfiltered) and /top already works well.

I agree. I don't like this idea.

Don't be like Reddit and not give the CCP posters a warning first.

Great idea.

There are voat users with CCP at around -300 and these guys submit 20+ links per hour.

holy shit. tbh that's kind of hilarious.

Edit: I agree with this.

I am counting on the power of the people to make the right decisions. If one user gets targeted by an entire sub, the user can still make a new thread (even 5) and write what happened. The community could then go and upvote his comments to get him out of the throttle mode, or, the story would be brought up and we could manually restore his account. Only time will tell how this will work, it's only been up for a day now.

Great!

However I find it funny that you called it shitposting without any qualms. :)

It sort of reminds me of the gamefaqs karma system. But at least I can get away with saying a lot more. :]

Sounds like something from Reddit's Core Values.

Is this Ellen Pao's alternate account or something? Why limit free speech in any way? We came here to get away from that...

So voat begins the slippery slope that reddit took. Very well. Let the brigades begin. You'll be nostalgic for the days that spamming was the only problem.

I don't think this is a good change due to the possibility of future brigades now having the capabilities to shutter off any negative opinions, simply by downvoting them to (what is essentially) limbo.

... and CommonSenseWarrior already created an alt /u/CSW to circumvent your new limitations. He then bragged about being able to circumvent any potential future IP ban (which for some magical reason he knows may be on it's way) with his VPN.

What now?

Bad, bad idea. You're allowing vote brigaders to censor the site.

Why is it not letting me upvote this even though I'm already logged on?

I thought of a variation of this. When a user is at <=-50 CPP, do limits like you described. Then, a moderator in a subverse can allow more posts/comments from from the user to that sub but the posts wouldn't show up in /v/all as long the CCP is <=-50. That way the downvoted user can continue to post to some subs freely and all will have less spam.

...But then you would have to have a separate counter for votes without those subs. Might not be worth the trouble, perhaps.

This may run into issues with posts like this popular post from Valve on reddit. The issue being that even though the poster is trying to discuss, the user base is so angry with the idea that downvoting occurs regardless of content. What could happen is that the poster could reach -50 CCP and can't then respond with answers to questions in their own post. Maybe the 5 comments/day limitation could be lifted in discussions/links that the poster created?

Whatever you have to do during the reddit death throes and beyond. Just be upfront and let users know what they're getting. Shadowbanning people is a shitty, shitty thing to do. That should have been reserved for spammers over on that other site.

I don't like this change. This could be bad for people with very unpopular opinions and ideas, like me. So far I have censored myself on voat in order to maintain a net positive, but whenever I share some of my true thoughts I do get downvoted.

I don't like this change, because I think people should be able to say what they want here as much as they want.

I like this, I also really like the enforcing of having to contribute content and accrue CCP before you can vote more, it encourages discussion and actual interaction which I think will be essential in keeping the quality here.

The only concern is possible brigading issues, but hopefully with the spirit of the site, the people who are inclined to do that won't find this an appealing place to be in the first place.

Good call. This can help prevent the site from being sabotaged.

We'll obviously have to adjust the numbers as voat grows and keep a close watch on this. Voat is a small community and we're just tweaking things. Perhaps when looking at negative CCPs, we could add other factors to compensate for things which get downvoted to oblivion. Example: if you submit 100 things and only 50% of these are downvoted to oblivion, you don't get throttled. But if 90% of the stuff you submit always gets downvoted to oblivion - the message is clear.

The part of this that bothers me is that it affects your "unpopular" users just as much as your trolls and spammers.

Having an "unpopular" opinion shouldn't shut you out of the conversation, being a bot that posts 100 copy-pastas a day should.

But we should note the difference.

If a super religions neo-con came on here I could easily see them getting to -50 CCP in no time. But should that push them completely out of the conversation? I don't think so.

Honestly I don't know if anything really needs to be done at all, but it's not my site so whatever.

Free speech is free for everyone, even idiots and shitposters. Censorship kills free speech, slowly but surely. Seems more like a reddit move than something implement by a site that ostensibly values freedom of expression.

I think your implementing rules that are fair. The only issue I see with this is that a shit poster will continue to post shit with alternate accounts, I'm not sure what can be done to fix that issue unfortunately.

Thank you for your work Atko. Good stuff here. That's why I give my energy and time to Voat, and not others.

Seems like a good imitative - i'm only new here but i was going to say i thought this would happen ha ha looks like it already happened i mean my first Question was going to be :

say i'm a floor at the "NSA" dedicated to trying to ruin free speech - now we all create a "VOAT" account and spam post then all up-vote that spam?

becasue there is no limit to up voting right?

i'm not saying that is happening, but i'm thinking about if this site is successful.

Even though I am a new kid around here, this is a great rule.

I am so happy this is a global thing. On reddit I have a pretty positive score but on the LoL sub I got really negative because people thought I was asking stupid questions and ever since I could only post a comment every 10 minutes. Not a big deal but really seemed undeserved so I never bothered after that. So glad this can't happen here!

If someone's global score is so low then that means there's no one that likes what they post. 50 is a bit much but maybe it can be increased if the site picks up. Or not I guess, if the person really can't make good posts in ANY subs then good riddance

I don't like this shit. It is defiantly going to lead to censorship of unpopular opinions, and as much as I don't agree with them being racist is nothing more than an opinion. I understand no one wants shit tons of spam, but we need a system that will only target spammers then. We don't need a system that silences anyone with low ccp. I don't now how feasible this is but maybe you could use the same kind of thing they have in schools to check papers for plagiarism. A program that would check over the words in the person in questions post and if it was over say, 70% match it would apply the debuff on a timer. Any who that's my two cents. I think this is a pretty shit way to deal with it.

Thank you. Not to name names, but that a-hole was just shotgunning crap into subverses it did not even belong in just to see what would stick.

Unfortunately this is needed, especially during the early days. As a new user I fully appreciate the value in making me wait a few weeks before I can start whoring that sweet sweet CCP. ;)

CCP is comment contribution points; the tally of total upvotes and downvotes on all your comments.

SCP is submission contribution points; the same thing for submissions.

Basically the two scores you see up on the user bar and on your profile page.

I thought we were going to go with giving people the ability to block users themselves instead of taking away other peoples ability to speak?

Doesn't this just create a hive mind? You will have to submit content and comments that appease the majority.

Shouldn't, instead of this sort of automatic moderation applied universally, the system stay at it's current rating-based mechanic (identifying shitposters with negCCP) and leave it to sub mods to deal with people causing mischief?

While this does sound fair, I have to caution that this tool has another edge by allowing these copypasta types to brigade en masse and downvote their least favorite users just to cause havoc. So far my experience here hasn't been anything but warm to lukewarm really but I'd take that anyday compared to the treatment I got over one comment on stsnbn/SquaredCircleJerk because one guy thought I "sounded condescending" in one of my posts. That's really my only concern.

This looks like a good way to nip things in the bud before they get out of hand.

may have negative effect on legit users.

So let's lock up all the people we don't like the looks of just in case they do something we don't care for.

The main draw of Voat is that reddit-style crap like this wasn't implemented. I predict a noticeable drop in traffic here. By trying to protect us, you are subjugating us.

That's even worse than reddits post limiter.

If this system is intended to catch someone who submits rapid-fire garbage, why is it targeting everyone with a negative score?

Imagine a television broadcasting nothing but white noise at an obnoxiously loud volume.

Now imagine a televesion next to it broadcasting a well-thought-out but unpopular program.

Both are voted by the community to acquire a score of -300 CCP.

The system you laid out, in its current state, would mute both of them. Shouldn't you be focusing on the frequency of submissions rather than the score?

I'd like to add my voice to the please don't break vote side.

This will not end well, and may cause me to look elsewhere. Please, please, implement a block user function instead.

You're missing his point. I believe he's saying you drown out other content in /new, not necessarily a specific subverse.

You're right. The more I think about it, the more I dislike the idea of popular vote throttling individual voices. It's a dangerous thing on a platform priding itself for its lack of censorship.

There has to be a better way to throttle abusive behaviour (posting 500 spammy, obnoxious reposts a day). There has to be a better way for people to deal with content they don't like other than voting someone be silenced.

An ignore button that can gag private messages, public posts, or both. A personal word filter that will collapse or completely hide posts or usernames based on user-defined criteria. If someone wants to censor content, let them censor and control their own private feed only. It becomes personal responsibility.

Edit: Oh, and give that ignore list limits to avoid mass-censorship blacklists like SJWs wield on Twitter, such as throttling the number of people you can ignore per day to something small, but reasonable (5 people). I don't like the idea of hard-capping how many people in total can be ignored as that forces people to potentially unblock someone they don't want to just to make room for someone else.

I don't think this is a great idea, especially in the long term. Is negative CCP indicative of spamming? Is it even indicate of low contribution? We've seen in reddit and we'll see here that downvoting is often used to express disagreement, and it will continue to do so. This will result in homogeneity of content.

If you're worried about spam in /v/all, then we should have some system for downvoting subverse content as a whole or blocking. Another easy implementation is subverse limiting in /v/all, which is fine for the intended purpose of browsing all on the basis of seeing a diverse range of subverses. But if you're worried about individual spamming within a subverse, then there should simply be some way to report spam and have posts buried on their individual content. Individual user ratelimiting is essentially pre-censorship. Perhaps you should just lower the amount of posts users can post in general, making the delay between posts longer and longer, e.g. 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16... seconds between posts.

I like these ideas. I wish you guys (and/or gals) good luck in running this site.

/u/SurviorType seems to understand. You push the limits on purpose and then get mad when people get fed up with you. You and Justin bieber should hang out and rep your street cred.

Not to be a dick, but I don't want your average reddit user here.

If this place ends up full of shills and morons upvoating threads full of nonsensical combo posts and memes, I'll leave and not look back.

Adhering to the letter of the law while deliberately spitting on the spirit and bothering as many people as you can might be allowed, but it absolutely makes you a right prick, and you should accept your negative reputation and the ill will thrown your way as the inevitable consequence of that.

Censorship isn't inherently bad. If you're a net negative, everyone's better off with you gone.

Just joined and can't submit. Twice I tried.

So your personal morals had nothing to do with it, you are trying to piss people off and then get angry when they get pissed off. Go watch a movie troll. You are wrong.

You are complaining because what you want to happen is happening and you are getting blocked. I guess I should ask, you say you were posting things to test the system? Now that the system has been tested you want you old posting right enabled? Sounds pretty fishy, you fought the system and were declared a douche, sit with the conviction you earned.

A personal block would serve the community better than an effective site lock-out that can be imposed by unjust brigade voting.

You are a douche but I agree with you, fuck you and your subs!

Wow, I keep reading down the thread and you keep being a douche. Justify what you do how you want but at some point you have to look back and realize you are the one thing that is not good in all these posts and replies.

awesome! I did not know if there was a separate downbeat score. At one point of time i thought left was upvoats and right downvoats, and i had like a 10 to 100 ratio on a previous account.

I don't think you understand how a community works. Have you ever lived in a small community where everyone knows who you are and what you have done? Bad behavior is quickly ostracized and people learn what is ok and not ok within the society. If you want a chaotic anarchy you go have it but I prefer to have a certain degree of respect in my community

I'm reserving judgement until I see it in practice, but does CCP always indicate "shitposting", or can it indicate unpopular opinions being buried when the site gains more of a userbase? Will people who simply go against the flow be muffled until they fall in line? If a user is at -300 CCP, how long would it take to gain 250 CCP at 5 posts per day? I'm not a very active user, but it's taken me many months to get nearly 90 CCP.

And as we've seen with Reddit, once you take a good name, it means other subreddits don't come close to being able to match traffic.

We can solve that problem by removing the mods who happen to be dicks.

Like you.

maybe past a negative amount it heals in a week with a shield or something to prevent people from being silenced

Well the username you have now doesn't have anything I would object to as far as I could find. I might not like what you say but I don't want my speech threatened which means that wether I like it or not you have the right to free speech. This is something I think as an anarchist is very important but a certain sites anarchy subforum seems to think is a bad thing. I do agree with some way to stop brigading and the like though. Is there a way to do that without violating free speech?

how do we see our negative score?

Because, to put it bluntly, it's selfish.

Wouldn’t that just be /v/all/hot? Or maybe we need a /v/all/trending that has a ranking formula skewed more towards newness (on the scale of hours) than votes, while hot is skewed towards votes over a longer period of time (like a day or two).

cool, thank you

You gotta wonder why that person got banned from reddit in the first place. This thread is a slippery slope period and time will tell but I don't mind being patient to get something good.

I guess my only issue with what some of the users are saying about limiting upvoating/dowvoating after a week is that it is not an issue, and I don't see it being an issue for a long time. Let people upvoat the posts that brought us here to what we have become.

Be proactive sure, but it seems like we are fixing a issue that we wish we could fix on Reddit, even though it is not an issue on Voat, and I don't see why we can cross this bridge when we get there.

I'm genuinely sorry you feel that way. As I stated I'm brand new here and thought this was a refreshing change. Would you care to explain why you think not allowing people who have previously received large amounts (bearing in mind that I assume should -100CCP become a rather minor amount, this could be changed) of negative feedback to post large amounts of comments and/or links is a negative? I'm genuinely curious and don't understand your perceived unhappiness.

From the whole site? That's odd. What rules did you break, other than spam, which would still only be in specific subverses?

I sometimes wonder about the time threshold for voting on submissions. I personally like to go through old stuff and I see a lot of submissions and comments that I would like to upvote but can't due to being archived.

Indeed, and that's when as a community the decision needs to be made whether or not said change will lead to the betterment of said community. It seems this one is approved of...

You brought this on yourself, man. I'm not the one who spammed and ignored peers who asked me to stop and I didn't create the new feature.

Good intentions that got trodden all over.. There can be no progress without change

I literally just got here from that other site and this is the first thing I've read and I'm very very pleased to see it. Fantastic idea I hope it tests out well.

It's an issue of maturity more than anything else. The attitude that it's okay to do something you know is wrong/questionable merely because it isn't explicitly forbidden is a very child-like way of thinking.

/u/GOT is a good example - he constantly posts weird troll comments, but doesn't bother me in the least since he has the common sense to stay in particular subverses. You were intentionally spreading it around as much as possible.

The arrows should run away from your mouse pointer when you get close.

How will this work if say two groups, let's say /r/TRP & /r/TBP with 50 users each, they decide to see who's posting in the other verse/sub and downvote users as a group? How would people avoid being censored like this?

See? You still don't get it. It's not about what you said, It's about you spamming it everywhere. On the other hand, thank you. I wasn't exactly in favor of this new feature. You have now changed my view.

Up-vote/Agree!

I also would prefer if the block user function worked.

Hey, it's not me who decides, it's you guys, you decide by voting. Blame the democracy. Or should we remove voting altogether and just redirect voat.co to 4chan or 8chan? :)

You can't respect your peers, but now you expect us to respect you and not argue?

That you don't respect other users further reinforces how at fault you were.

You are the problem, and yes, you did expose it. You just happen to be part of the problem you've exposed.

permalink save source reply report spam

Isn't the ability to pick out spam already built into Voat? What does "report spam" feature do exactly behind the scenes if it doesn't already trigger some sort of throttling already?

Edit: I see in public sourcecode that it sends an email to an abuse alias and nothing more. Would it make more sense though to have the "report spam" nav option trigger this throttling if a comment or post receives enough reports? Given the ability for mods to enforce thresholds already in their subs, isn't this extra enhancement unnecessary and even giving another method to abuse other users?

It's possible to ban users who brigade, but it requires human intervention, and I'm not sure it's something that could be 100% possible in software without false positives.

You would need to be able to track what users are downvoting a single user, and tracking the last sub they visited for signs of a post or comment where that user was mentioned. It's not going to be exact, because it's possible to do this sneakily, but with enough users, the point of origin becomes easier to trace.

Wow. I never thought that I would agree with you, yet here we are. I support your right to say what ever hate-filled, trollish bullshit you want to say. And you obviously really believe in it as evidenced on your insistence of spamming the hell out of us. I just don't want to be inundated with your cancer.

Agreed. All the subs I go to don't get more than one or two posts a day, so a week would still mean that a post could be on Page 1 of the sub, but you wouldn't be able to vote on it.

Maybe also add an indicator for when you can't vote on a post anymore. Maybe an hourglass that's tall enough to replace both vote arrows, signaling that you're too late (hourglass itself) and that you can't vote (No more arrows to click)? An annoying thing on Reddit for me was that I'd occasionally find an old post, click a vote button without seeing its age, and get met with the "This post is archived and voting is disabled" or whatever message it is.

Wouldn't a modtool for this be better and easier to implement? Let mods set the expiration limit instead of finding some sub/thread based routine for it.

so long as what is said is not censored im ok with this

Therefore there should be an appeals process.

While I can see why this is necessary right now, I would hope that once we have a working block user feature, that it can be phased out.

I'd agree with this, with the caveat that the subverse needs to remove itself from /v/all if it's bordering on spam level. Yes, people can use the block button - but legitimate content shouldn't force people to do that just to access a good variety of other content.

People did ask you to stop, and you outright refused.

Absolutely, let the community moderate itself.

Except brigading is often performed by groups of users who have been part of that sub for a long time. That requirement down the line is functionally useless.

Many of us asked you to stop spamming. You ignored us. You did what you did purposefully. You knew it was wrong. Let's not pretend differently.

Not if they spam, to the point where they displace the content of other users.

Especially once the user can block the subverse from v/all.

The expiration limit sounds like a good idea. 1 week? If a thing is older than 1 week, we could lock voting on it. I'll add it to TODO list.

I love this feature. I don't believe that it impinges on free speech in a negative way. It does discourage the trolls that are a blight on sites like this.

It's a small website, things are going to be like flying by the seat of their pants until such things are fleshed out.

The problem wasn't you being controversial, the problem was you spamming.

Isn’t the shitposting already contained by downvoting?

Take the hypothetical -300 CCP guy. He’s already getting downvoted, obviously. The majority of users won’t see his comments or posts because the first few “good” users to come across them do the job of filtering it out.

The whole purpose of a peer moderated site is to have users filter good and bad content. Rate-limiting like this is attempting to filter content before it is posted. I don’t like it.

Are you that white supremacist guy? I didn't know that was against the rules.

Edit: Oh, you were apparently spamming.

Oh you're more than welcome to say whatever controversial thing you want, just don't fucking spam it 100 times per day like you've been doing so far and let other people say what they want to say too. Live and let live, you know?

Edit: your old account is still very much usable, you are just throttled to 5 comments and 1 link/submission per day. Wait 24 hours and you're free to post whatever controversial thing you want.

This! I got so annoyed when reddit users would go through my history and down vote all my comments because I disagreed with them in a thread. That's abusing the system.

A feature that allows us to decide if a particular user's submissions and comments show up would be more useful than a feature that limits their submission.

good move.

IMHO, throttle new account thread creation as well to prevent these guys from just making a new account once they hit -50.

my suggestion, no link/discussions submission for accounts <3 days old or < 10 CCP. If you can't be patient enough to get over that slight delay, you probably don't have the maturity to make decent posts.

Much better than silently deleting people's shit (Automoderator setting) without informing them when they have negative karma.

This is a fine feature for now, but this may become an issue in later years. As we've seen on Reddit, brigading happens, and users have been reduced to figures well into the negative through no fault other than a set of users who disagree with what that user has said.

I would advise that a petitioning system be implemented at a later date, and a provision for users to be exempted from this comment throttling if it can be demonstrated that, on appeal, their conduct falls within site rules.

Are you talking about this part?

If a user has -50 CCP or less, they will only be able to post 5 comments per day until their CCP improves.

If a user has -50 CCP or less, they will only be able to submit 1 discussion or 1 link per day until their CCP improves.

because they're two different limits, both based on CCP - one is comments per day, one is post submissions per day

5 comments a day...Hmmm.

I don't know about this. I think if I were limited that way it would just put me completely off of using Voat. Then instead of having a reformed or pissed user, you have an empty space where they used to be. It also allows people to shout down unpopular opinions. Just downvote them enough, and they have all of 5 comments a day to make their case. And if their opinion stays unpopular, what do they do then? They roll over and agree with whatever's popular or they stay with 5 comments a day until the wind eventually changes and their opinion becomes popular again, or they just make another account, or they leave.

I see why this is being done, I think, based on your statement. Are you perhaps referencing-but-not-referencing a certain white supremacist who likes to post the same copy paste crap everywhere? That I could understand. It's just concerning to me that this could very easily be abused to support the circlejerk and shout down dissent, especially from new users. I wouldn't want to be the feminist joining this website right now with this in place.

Yupp this is a great change - the only future flaw I see is that there needs to be a limit on how much negative CCP you can get from a specific post. Right now it isn't an issue because of the 100 CCP required to downvote, but once a broad group of people is over 100 then it becomes possible to brigade people into the negatives and they'll have a real hard time coming back from that.