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
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.
Sepiku ago
You bring up some good points. I bet there is way to write some software that could track who votes what and wether those users continually down vote the same post as other users. Damn, I guess that is kinda like guilty by association and that sounds pretty shitty as I write it but there might be a way to make it work.
something_went_wrong ago
It shouldn't require too much human intervention. How about mods be given the option to "lock" or "protect" either one or all comments in a post. This would make it so users can still comment/reply, but just can't up or downvoat any other locked comment in that post (including child comments of that "protected" parent). Use case is when someone's comment gets brigaded, the user reports the brigade to mods, mods "protect" that comment basically killing any further brigading.
TwoTailedFox ago
That's... actually quite imaginative. Why not have both? "Comment Lock" and "Vote Lock".
Nationalist ago
Just please, please, make comments that are locked say that they are locked and by whom.
This would be a horrible feature to let people use secretly.