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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8006485? ago
There's already been plenty of discussion in this thread concerning the only issue with this post I see, and I see you've already commented saying you will be releasing more information outlining what constitutes brigading before acting on the change. All of the changes to deal with vote manipulation and archiving make perfect sense to me, and I see no issues with them. I commend you for the solid action plan.
As for the banning of brigaders, even with a clear definition of this, this is the only potential issue with this update. You say that your intention is only to ban people intentionally abusing systems maliciously. But how solid is our definition of what is malicious? This will also depend on how solid our definition of what brigading is. As long as there is some system of checks and balances where the banning of users is concerned, I'll be satisfied. I know this is for the betterment and protection of Voat and freedom of speech, but with changes of this scale we need to be careful is all, as I know you well know.
Thanks for the update.
SaneGoatiSwear ago
he banned 200 accounts with around 10 votes ever given (mostly all upvotes). for "vote manipulation"
lol.
no clarification 6 days later.
SANEgoat.
8096559? ago
One vote used in a vote farming thread is enough to constitute vote manipulation, especially if that account is an obvious alt account (JesusofNazareth, cygnus, etc.) The only non=obvious accounts that were banned for vote manipulation had thousands of votes, not merely 10.
SaneGoatiSwear ago
says who? not the CEO, seeker. you just made that up. what you talkin bout, shillis?
8096646? ago
I made nothing up. If you manipulate votes, you are guilty of vote manipulation. Words have meaning and Putt is working off of those meanings.
Sure he has made executive decisions, but if your username matches a hundred other usernames and your only votes after making your account are in an apparent vote manipulation subverse, you have participated in vote manipulation. This isn't me making things up.
Exactly who do you object to having been banned? I haven't heard anyone who has actually been banned stepping forward and claiming injustice. They know what they've done.
SaneGoatiSwear ago
not a single account that brigaded users into -ccp restrictions was banned.
8096851? ago
Such as?
Tipman79 ago
And how can you tell (with proof) if an account is guilty of downvoat brigading?