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.
view the rest of the comments →
creep ago
I'm reserving judgement until I see it in practice, but does CCP always indicate "shitposting", or can it indicate unpopular opinions being buried when the site gains more of a userbase? Will people who simply go against the flow be muffled until they fall in line? If a user is at -300 CCP, how long would it take to gain 250 CCP at 5 posts per day? I'm not a very active user, but it's taken me many months to get nearly 90 CCP.
unfair ago
I'm getting roughly 10-15 CCP per "good" post, and it took me a week or two to get over 150 CCP from zero - for the most part I could have done that while staying under 5 posts per day.
If you're seriously concerned about raising your CCP it's totally doable no matter how low it may seem. (Although if that person has seriously annoyed the regular people off it's going to be harder to get them to upvote even his normal content)
creep ago
How do you define, in computer software, what constitutes a "good post", a "regular person", and "normal content"? If there's a great post that's just an unpopular opinion, and that single post gets hit with a profoundly negative score, isn't that just permitting the majority to rule what the minority is permitted to voice? This system is going to facilitate censorship in its current state.
unfair ago
creep ago
That's arbitrary. Who gets to define those things? You? Me? If I find your posts offensive, but you don't, which one of us is right?
unfair ago
I'm not defining anything, merely trying to convey how easy it is to gain CCP. One negative vote here and there isn't going to do anything to me.
creep ago
What if you were hit with a single -3000 score on a single post someday in the future, putting you below -300 total?
How easy or hard it is to mitigate collateral damage is a poor test of how effective this proposed system will be, especially when everyone's scores and rate of acquiring scores will be different.
You're saying content should impose gag orders.
I'm saying the frequency of submissions should be the criteria for imposing this proposed throttle, not the content.
It's the rapid-fire nature of the submissions that @Atko cited as the problem. He even said the content itself is irrelevent.
You're advocating the wrong fix for this problem. Don't praise it simply because it's the first fix to be proposed. Scrutinize it for flaws. We can do better.
unfair ago
I already stated in the very top post that in the future there will need to be limits on the max that can be lost from a post, once more people are able to downvote. There's no need to put words in my mouth.
The block user feature may mitigate part of the problem once that's introduced too, though there should probably still be some overall limits that restrict spamming. Once the dev sees how this method works I'm sure he'll tweak it.
Atko ago
A valid concern. However, vice versa is also possible - with spam burrying all other opinions if left uncontrolled. I guess this one is lesser of 2 evils as unpopular opinions can still be posted every day by the same user.
creep ago
Is there a way for the software to scrutinize and identify shitposts?
If they are rapid-fire submissions throughout a day, would that look very different than someone getting hit with a one-time -3000 CCP brigade with intent to silence?
Would a habitual shitposter appear different than someone who had a good post history and was legitimately downvoted to oblivion in a single incident?
What about someone whose entire post history is being downvoted by a brigade? Can brigading activity be detected and blocked?
NinjaPoolboy ago
What is a "shitpost" anyway? It sounds like one of those SJW code words used to control thoughts and ideas though censorship. This is why I left Reddit. It always starts with an proclamation to fixed something that is not really broke all based on an ideology. Uhg.
Thjoth ago
A shitpost is simply a post with no value. It may or may not also be really stupid. There can be fun shitposts ( /r/eve is full of them) but most of them are just shitty memes and spam.
NinjaPoolboy ago
It's sounds like some type of comment "correctness," if you will. I just don't think those posts necessarily lack value. Most posts have value to the person posting them. (Sans Spam) Who is to go around deciding that posts aren't valid because of that persons own posting ideology on how a community should conduct discourse?
It's this very act of trying to quantify posts and get rid of the ones that don't meet such standards that is so bad for community's like Reddit and Voat. I really don't want to see this behavior adopted here site-wide. People need to voluntarily improve there posting skills, And you have to remember that posting in intellectual ways is much harder for some than others.
Isn't down-voting "shit-post" enough? I always thought it was. I don't think we should classify spam is shit-posting, they aren't natural human posts in my opinion. Spam can be deleted without much controversy because it is not part of the conversation. I have never seen someone refer to spam as a "shit-post," Spam is a much worse designation. It seems to me that personal only short "chime-in" type comments are usually branded the "shit-post" moniker.
Why must everyone that is involved in a conversation be held to such a standard? There are meany people that are just learning how to write properly on the internet, You are essentially being hostile towards them. In my case, My early post's have always been "ad hominem'ed" because of my dyslexia and troubles spelling. (This was before universal spellcheckers.) Isn't designation of certain post as "shit-posts" of the same fallacious mentality?
NinjaPoolboy ago
Wow, sounds like an extremely broad and subjective thing.