On Vote Manipulation + Other Updates (announcements)

submitted ago by PuttItOut

Today Voat pushed an update meant to address three things: Vote manipulation, Archiving Data, and Feature Prep. I will keep this announcement as short as possible.

Vote Manipulation

I have been researching vote farming and brigading for about a month. And honestly, I’m pissed off. What I have found is simply unacceptable. These actions destroy Voat’s credibility and value and will be actively developed against. The following actions have been taken to increase vote integrity:

  • Users no longer earn CCP in Private Subverses (Common farming technique)
  • Users no longer earn CCP in Subverses with Minimum Downvote values greater than zero (Common farming technique)
  • User deleted comments have their positive CCP removed (Common farming technique)

Archiving Data

  • Voat is now archiving old submissions (current set to 3 months).
  • Archived and Deleted Submissions, and their comments, can no longer be voted on.
  • Vote counts are using individual vote counts instead of the up/down totals on comments/submissions*
  • Users with High SCP/CCP should see an improvement accessing Voat when data isn’t in cache

* Please note that all point values will drop because of this new logic. Prior logic counted up/down totals on submissions and comments instead of the individual votes themselves (it was more performant this way). When a user deletes their account, their votes are removed but the up/down totals are not adjusted. Since new logic uses individual vote counts everyone’s points will be dropping unfortunately. Just heads up. @Atko was hit the worst of all, poor guy.

Future Feature Prep

  • Schema changes were made to prepare for the re-release of Sets (grouping of multiple subverses). Voat will begin set development next week as we have designed many upcoming features upon this basic structural concept including categorization, new user centric functionality (more info soon), expanded and more functional blocking capabilities, and the concept of “following” users who publish feeds (more info soon).
  • Naming conventions and indexing has been cleaned up in database.

Warning to Vote Brigadiers

I will shortly be banning hundreds of obvious alt accounts used to farm/brigade at Voat. While researching this problem, I noticed that no one is really innocent, meaning that we have both obvious farming/brigading going on but we also have this behavior from good solid users too. It is for this reason that I am not retroactively banning any accounts other than the obvious ones mentioned above.

From this point forward, if you brigade another users’ content your account will be banned.

Consider this fair warning that brigading and manipulating votes is no longer tolerated at Voat.

There is a new Sheriff in town.

Canary Notice:

https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806

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8005104? ago

Can you speak to whether anti-free-speech mod behavior is permissible in very popular but non-system-owned subs? Such as /v/TIL. Mass deletions, mass banning, rules for the users but not for the mod, etc. Similar to what @She was doing.

Also, what constitutes brigading? Subverses targeting another subverse? Alts used for voting? Or what about when someone goes through your comment history and downvotes everything?

SaneGoatiSwear ago

fuck off nigger everyone was unbanned. it was just till the harassment of me died down, shill.

kevdude's on the front page with a v/til post.

mass deletions

of a giant organized harassment campaing INCLUDING BY YOU you fucking dirty nigger shill

nothing like what she did you stupid nigger

dirty nigger criminal shill shilling so hard his shekels fell off his dirty hairy greasy neck

CONFIRMED SRS

ayy lmao you little nigger so easy.

MaunaLoona ago

There isn't a massive conspiracy against you. It's just that no one likes you or your posts.

SaneGoatiSwear ago

https://voat.co/v/gaming/961290/4818777

lol you're fucking retarded. this has nothing to do with me. i just threw my username up and watched all the shills jump on it. ayyy lmao. pay attention, voat's run by sjws.

thrus ago

That might be a better argument if you were in that thread that you linked to.

SaltyMango ago

Why haven't you killed yourself yet?

8005899? ago

Now that vote brigading has been fixed, when you're downvoted to negative CCP in a few days you won't be able to effectively moderate TIL. Someone will then take it over.

You're in no position to judge anything, considering the slightest criticism of your spammy, hypocritical, autistic rants sends you into a deletion and banning spree.

SkillYourself ago

Holy shit. SGIS is down to 800 SCP and 5k CCP. How many sockpuppets do you need @SaneGoatiSwear? This only confirmed my theory that everyone on this website is a SGIS alt.

Thisismyvoatusername ago

Regarding your theory that everyone is a SGIS alt. How would I go about testing whether I am or not. Now I am worried. I feel self-aware, but how do I really know?

thrus ago

You are good, you replied to someone without insulting them.

E-werd ago

Shut up shill nigger.

oh god...

SaneGoatiSwear ago

did you read the post?

all of a sudden deleted accounts' votes disappear from other users' scp and ccp counts

ffs atko lost thousands, @highly_paid_orgy_pro lost 5000scp and 3000ccp WAAAAY more than i did

but you hold on to that

confirmation bias

you go right ahead.

SkillYourself ago

The difference being HPOP and Atko are usually upvoted. You however, every thread is generally negative CCP/SCP. How many accounts were you making each day to maintain? 10? 50?

8006589? ago

Oh yes, it's all one big coincidence! You're just like the others! https://i.imgtc.com/oDqrOuv.png

guinness2 ago

That graph is awesome!

Can you let us know how it was produced and what other charts can be similarly generated?

ExpertShitposter ago

A user was manually monitoring his account to make the graph.

Thisismyvoatusername ago

Jesus, if that is true, some user needs to find a better hobby. Fuck. I cannot imagine devoting myself to tracking someone points to graph it.

ExpertShitposter ago

Well it was just one screen shot per hour for one day. Might have been three 8hour shifts by 3 users.

Fambida ago

Lol, that graph fuckin says it all. general down trend followed by a quick self brigade to raise it. Rinse n repeat.

Volcris ago

At this point, I would say cut him some slack. The guy is clearly unhinged, and the way he posts is not really convincing anyone to take him seriously.

This place doesn't have to be reddit, instead of piling hate on him, I suggest just ignore him.

8006212? ago

I'll ignore him (and block him) once he stops fucking up a subverse I subscribe(d) to. He's a mod that bans people, deletes more content than @She ever did, and then spams his insane rants everywhere.

Thisismyvoatusername ago

I really don't think it is a fair comparison, though. @she was attemtping to steer conversations in a way to ake progressive ideals and positions seem like they had more support than they really did. Sane on the other hand is just kind of insane. Sometimes he seems fine and other times he seems like he is clinically paranoid. He often lets things stay even if he disagrees (he just insults people and rants about criminal shills). Alternatively, he also deletes things for reasons that are hard to understand using normal logic.

So @she was affirmatively harmful to the free speech ideals of Voat. Sane is more like Shia LaBeouf style performance art or something.

Volcris ago

At the rate he is going, and with the reasonable changes that are being made, I'm sure that won't be a problem for too much longer.

He did bring up one point I admit I am too lazy to check, will these new bans appear in the log? I would prefer spam-bams to have their own log for transparency's sake so this doesn't threaten to become another "we only shadow ban bots" situation.