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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forced_participant ago
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?
Atko ago
I will implement an "off switch" for this. Essentially, the throttling (please don't call it censorship, google the word) should only apply to subverses which are not private (the ones which choose to be seen in /v/all).
forced_participant ago
The off switch sounds good. All I could see is two groups going at each other and the nightmare it would be. I'm not sure why I need to google censorship. That is what you are allowing the users to do, calling by another name doesn't change that.
Atko ago
Glad you're happy with the off switch. As far as censorship goes, I guess you and I have a different definition of what constitutes censorship :)
forced_participant ago
I see the difference. My definition would also include suppression which is included in the Merriam-Websters definition you linked as well as the definitions from dictionary.com, thefreedictionary.com and when you type "censorship definition" into google the first line is "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts" In this instance you're empowering the users to suppress unacceptable or objectionable content. While it's true that users will not be able to silence anyone completely, the limit is a form of suppression, which is part of nearly every definition of censorship that I looked at.