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
view the rest of the comments →
mispelledsomething ago
Does downvoting a user who spams the same copypasta across different threads when you come across it count as brigading?
TheTrigger ago
Right?
Speak for yourself, putt-putt. I dindu nuffin, I's a good boy. I ain't steal no upvoats. Check my downvoats, I ain't doin' drive-bys. I'm just keepin' my head down, goin' to school to turn my life around.
SaneGoatiSwear ago
no one pay attention to the fact that anyone not speaking within the sjw narrative is being downvoat brigaded.
Talc ago
People who organised downvote brigades against others are also being downvoted heavily.
Redditsdead ago
I agree. I downvoat anything and everything sane posts. He's a flaming douchebag. He never contributes to voat positively. There is nothing organized about it though. I've never pm'd anyone about it and have never even gone on the voat chat or whatever it is. He's just an asshole that the majority of the community hates.
Talc ago
I'm stopping short of downvoting "everything" he posts and I'll admit I have upvoted him on multiple occasions in the past because what he's had to say has been relevant and even insightful, but any time I see him do that misquoting thing it'll get a downvote no matter what the content. If I see anyone else making a habit of abusing inline quoting in that way I'll start downvoting their lies also.
Dishonesty detracts from discourse, we should not need to scroll back up to check for lies every time we see an inline quote. Perhaps the site needs a change so that the text contained in an inline quote needs to be identical to text in the parent comment.
Of course, the upvotes I've given him in the past will all now be gone because both of those accounts are deleted.
mispelledsomething ago
This is how I feel. Vote based on the content, not the username.