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.

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something_went_wrong ago

Isn't the ability to pick out spam already built into Voat? What does "report spam" feature do exactly behind the scenes if it doesn't already trigger some sort of throttling already?

Edit: I see in public sourcecode that it sends an email to an abuse alias and nothing more. Would it make more sense though to have the "report spam" nav option trigger this throttling if a comment or post receives enough reports? Given the ability for mods to enforce thresholds already in their subs, isn't this extra enhancement unnecessary and even giving another method to abuse other users?

Sepiku ago

You seem to understand what makes this work, I am ignorant. Would you have any advice to a lazy peice of shit who can't bother to figure out for himself what to learn?

something_went_wrong ago

I suppose I do: If you're a lazy piece of shit, stop concerning yourself with the way things work and just accept it. Otherwise it's just self defeating.

Edit: or do you mean "good" advice? No, unfortunately I don't have much of that. Reading the website FAQ and keep asking questions when you don't know the answers yet would probably be a start.

Sepiku ago

Heh, thanks for the reply.