Ever since I graduated and moved from Sweden to Switzerland and started my first full time job here in Zurich, working for Voat became increasingly difficult for me. A project of passion and learning turned into one of business administration, community management, and essentially a 2nd job. A nonpaying, yet rather stressful and demanding job.
I started Voat under the name “forbidme” (which later became Whoaverse, which later became Voat) because I wanted to learn more about .NET and web development in general, but as more and more people started to use it, it became clear to me that there was a need for a platform like Voat. I never imagined that Voat would grow this big or mature the way it has. I’ve been through so much with Voat during these past 3 years, and if I could go back in time and face the same challenges, the same victories, and the same defeats - I would do it all over again!
Today though, primarily thanks to PuttItOut, Voat is a stable and scalable platform which happily serves over a million monthly unique visitors. I was the guy who had the crazy idea to start this project but now, 3 years later, I feel that it is time for someone else to assume this role.
Effective as of this announcement, and with a heavy heart, I am resigning as CEO of Voat, Inc. and handing over my role to PuttItOut. PuttItOut has been with me side-by-side through all the ups and downs, all the long nights, all the difficult conversations, all the challenging decisions, and proven he is both committed and capable to moving Voat forward as a platform for Free Speech. I am confident and excited that Voat will do great things in the future.
I will still be at Voat, just in a different role, as a user and member of the community.
To every user I’ve gotten to know, for every funny comment I’ve come across, for every post that has opened my eyes or made me mad, it has all been worth it and I’ll never forget the fun times. Here’s to more in the future, but with a bit less stress for me. ;)
Atko
Edit: canary stuff: https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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7814247? ago
It seems SaneGoat really hates you, and that he has increased from 5-7 downvote bots to around 12 (or about 5 people saw the initial 7 downvotes on your comment and continued them for the full conversation).
7814317? ago
which should be reasion enough to ban him. i guess this site has devolved into a power play of who has more alternate accounts and how many downvotes they can bring to bear on a chosen target. PuttItOut has his hands full.
7814353? ago
You do get a little bit of a buffer if you comment often and don't repeatedly directly reply to the spammers (the "Report Spam" button is there for a reason, although it is kinda pointless to use it if the admins or moderators of a subverse are already being pinged by the stupid spammer's comment), but yeah, Voat has always had a bit of trouble with alt accounts, especially with how much CCP is linked to so many systems controlling your ability to o anything.
7814431? ago
that's probably the only reason i'm not at negative ccp at the moment. only had 2 pages worth of comments in past 7 days or so. Heck of a design flaw. i wish i knew a fix, but as you said since ccp is tied to the core of this site, and they are deleting evidence, i'm not sure what the logs would show.
7814459? ago
As far as I know, Voat actually has a way of checking the IPs that voted on posts, and might be able to see if it was all bots from the same server.
Also, if we ever push the spammer off the site and have all the alts deleted, all of his votes will disappear, which will basically skyrocket your CCP back up to where it should be.
7814491? ago
so when an account is deleted their votes get removed? with a comment when it gets deleted the ccp stays on the account. that might be a solution. when a comment or post is deleted, remove the ccp assicoated with that account. that would stop the up vote circle jerk.
7814662? ago
The issue with that is spammers used to delete comments when they got too heavily downvoted, and their CCP would bounce back up to 0 (or even a positive rating if they had some comments on their own private "safe space" of a subverse).
7814683? ago
combine the ccp erasure with a script that looks for circle jerk accounts restricted to "safe spaces", and deletes them. that code may be difficult, but possible.
7814708? ago
Still doesn't solve the original problem of "spammers flooding comment sections, then deleting comments to avoid the consequences", and there is always the chance that a spam account was started by making a few legitimate good comments to gain some CCP, with the comments aged enough to be safe behind the 7-day downvote barrier before the spam starts.
Voat's system is far from perfect, but I still usually prefer it over Reddit's.
7814742? ago
i guess that brings us full circle, create an army of bots to fight the spammers, keep our heads low and hope to not get noticed, or keep looking for another solution @PuttItOut could use.