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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j_ ago
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.
unfair ago
I think the main problem being addressed here is /v/all/new - downvoting doesn't have any impact on a posts rankings there and CommonSenseWarrior was taking advantage of this to repeatedly post racist content to a variety of subverses - some of which weren't even remotely relevant to what he posted, and many only tangentially. Once the block person button is implemented it will be easier to solve for yourself, but they'd still be able to spam everyone else.
j_ ago
This doesn’t solve shitposting to /v/all/new — anyone can create a new account and shitpost to any subverse.
Blocking of users, blocking of subverses, and banning users from subverses will help. This doesn’t and is only open to abuse.
Atko ago
You are 100% correct as to why this was implemented. This feature targets /v/all/new and the feature is a tool given to entire voat community. If you guys don't like something, you can now at least make it show up less often in /v/all/new without me having to do anything. Use the downvotes carefully I guess. We'll see how the test-run goes, I may remove this feature if majority is against it.
j_ ago
Is it actually a problem though? That /v/all/new contains shit?
When you view /v/all/new, you are literally asking for “all the content, in reverse chronological order, without the influence of votes”. You are saying “show me all the shit before it is voted on!” The signal-to-noise ratio is expected to be near 0 for a site of sufficiently large size.
Seeing shit in /v/all/new should be a sign that the plumbing is working :)
unfair ago
It's a problem until Voat is more established, since people don't necessarily want to see the shitposting to vote on it, they're trying to find interesting subs and posts because the ones they already subscribe to aren't enough to keep them busy.