Introducing: comment and submission throttling for users with negative CCP (announcements)

submitted ago by Atko

I just rolled out a new, rather controversial feature which should help get some of the shitposters which voat attracted over the past few weeks under control.

How this works

  • 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.

Why do we need this?

There are voat users with CCP at around -300 and these guys submit 20+ links per hour. While voat userbase is relatively small, allowing shitposters to run free and post copypasta crap day in and day out, may have negative effect on legit users.

This feature may be seen as as a tool to limit free speech (voat moto is "have your say" after all), but free speech doesn't mean that everyone should be allowed to post endless copypasta crap all over voat in matters of minutes and thus impact the free speech of other users as shitposting copypasta crap will push down submissions of other users from /v/all/new and as such, if left uncontrolled, have a negative effect on freedom of speech of other users.

I don't care about the kind of content is being posted, as long as the content being posted is legal and not being spammed all over voat. If you want to get your message across, why not try doing it in a thought-out manner, discussing the topic, letting other users chime in and taking it from there, rather than just shouting your message across random subverses?

Now what?

I will keep this feature operational as a test-run to see how it works in practice.

Please feel free to discuss this and tell me how you feel about this.

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TwoTailedFox ago

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

j_ ago

If the problem is spamming — in this case taken to mean posting at a high rate — then shouldn’t the solution be to throttle based on this rate? i.e. a user is posting too often, so limit his submissions for a short while.

How do you justify a throttle based on controversiality (downvotes), if controversiality is not the problem?

TwoTailedFox ago

Downvotes do not indicate controversy; they indicate that a discussion point is disruptive, or unproductive.

Here, users have correctly indicated that the user is a problem, and that his spamming is detrimental.

j_ ago

Downvotes do not indicate controversy

I’d like this to be true but we know it isn’t. People downvote things they disagree with.

Here, users have correctly indicated that the user is a problem, and that his spamming is detrimental.

So again, shouldn’t the countermeasure be targeting his spamming behaviour, regardless of the content? i.e. if a user only posted cute kitten photos, but then started posting them not only to /v/aww but to random subs multiple times a day, they should be penalised equally to someone who spammed whatever content CSW did.

TwoTailedFox ago

The issue was spamming the same content (in this case, an inaccurate copypasta). The scenario outlined above should be taken care of by the mods of those subverses; one of the issues here is that the spammer was the mod of his own subverse.

j_ ago

The scenario outlined above should be taken care of by the mods of those subverses

Same for what happened; mods should ban CSW.

one of the issues here is that the spammer was the mod of his own subverse.

And that’s why we can block subverses we don’t want to see. Perhaps subverses should be unlisted from /v/all temporarily if there are enough spam reports (or spam reports are verified by an admin).