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.

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

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.

Atko ago

Shitposting wasn't contained by downvoting because users with -300 CCP had full freedom to keep posting shit regardless of how many downvotes they got. This is a tool which you, the users, now have. If you don't want to shun people - don't downvote them.

j_ ago

I didn’t ask for this tool and I don’t want it.

I want to be able to block a user if I personally consider his posts to be consistently shit.

I don’t want the software to silence a user based on votes, because I can disagree with the popular vote — just because a comment is negative, doesn’t mean that it is shit; and just because a comment is positive, doesn’t mean that it can’t be pure and utter shit to me.

TwoTailedFox ago

The software doesn't silence them.

j_ ago

It effectively does. 5 comments vs unlimited comments. 1 submission vs unlimited submissions.

TwoTailedFox ago

That's not silence, that's limitation.

j_ ago

You know I’m not being literal. A whisper in a noisy crowd, then —  not silent, but unable to be heard.

I’d love to hear your viewpoint on this and not just pedantic one-liners on each of my comments.

TwoTailedFox ago

Well, let me elaborate on points I have made elsewhere.

This system is already on Slashdot, where comments of companies and products often get labelled as "Flamebait" by users granted moderation privileges. The sanctions are more-or-less identical. I don't class that as acceptable.

This is a system with a much higher barrier for users to be effectively rate-limited. As an automatic system, I'm not comfortable with it, but with an appeals process, it would satisfy some reservations.

Nationalist ago

Wait, wasn't slashdot one of the boards people left en-mass for reddit?

TwoTailedFox ago

That was Digg. Slashdot was Digg's predecessor.

j_ ago

Do you mean the user whose post is modded as Flamebait gets rate-limited?

I was last familiar with Slashdot maybe… 10 years ago. I do know they have meta-moderation, some “who watches the watchmen” shit, so if you were unfairly modded you could have recourse (or at least some pretence of it).

TwoTailedFox ago

I remembered reading that the Karma would eventually move back to zero, and that certainly wasn't true.