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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mispelledsomething ago
Does downvoting a user who spams the same copypasta across different threads when you come across it count as brigading?
ChillyHellion ago
I'm curious about this too. Especially if no one is innocent, maybe the definition of brigading Voat's using is too general?
Or maybe he's saying that no definition of brigading leaves normal behavior untouched, so he's only going after egregious cases.
you-are-me ago
Exactly this.
Using a "commonly understood" but ill defined term to govern is the bane of all free peoples of earth.
Everyone understands what "brigading" means, of course! But, they each have their own definition of what that means in their head.
@puttitout should list specific examples of activities that will count as "vote manipulation" and "brigading" prior to sighting down the barrel of a gun as a "new sheriff in town". Otherwise, we risk a less extreme, but more dangerous version of SaneGoatiSwear cancer.
People will get pissed, say, "Awe come the fuck on, you let that other asshole get away with X and you ban me"? Then they'll lash out against new rules they feel are unfair, purposefully breaking them this time, reinforcing your flawed belief that they were trolls in the first place. Others will take sides and contribute. Troll-spiral is a hell of a drug.
I support putt's actions thus far, proven smart as fuck for not pulling a SaneGoat and sperging out, banning all the minor bullshit no one has a right to be "pissed off" about. We're not guilty of shit, I'm not buying that. You don't label a lawless town "guilty" because people had to defend themselves when there was no sheriff. It's a shitty place to be, but that's just the way it is.
Vigilante justice can be just IRL even if the "law" gets broken to do it. If the Sheriff wants to prevent that then fix this shit:
For example, and I keep coming back to this, because it's topical and obvious, not because I give a damn: If your moral convictions keep you from demodding or banning the shit out of a troll like SaneGoatiSwear, when there's ample evidence of modabuse, then you have absolutely zero right to get "pissed off" when other people resort to whatever minor means they have available and combat the fuckery, because admins let it continue, and appointed the trouble making reeeeeetard in the first place.
For the sake of argument let's say you pissed off SaneGoat and they went through and downvoated your entire comment history without reading them (hey, if the comments were actually read, then I wouldn't take issue look at the size of this bitch, amirite?) That shit's been going on and it seems like it's not ending soon. So, you create an alt and upvoat your own comment history, a single time on each comment. Is that vote manipulation? Or is that vote correction? Is it a bannable offense?
Is there grievance process to follow so that your extensive staff can handle each little foible prior to the users taking any retaliatory action of their own. Or, is it better to not need that staff, or very strict rules, and let goats handle their biznazz, while your limited staff only handles exceptional cases? Because if you've agreed to the latter, then we're not guilty, we're just on board with your program. Only the exceptional cases are worth being "pissed off" about.
What if you raise awareness about some obvious asshattery going on and that creates public consensus that a user is a shithead and lots of people organically downvoat them. Is that brigading? Calling a town meeting is not illegal even in towns where there are sheriffs, see. And you might not know this, but in the USA citizens can call a Grand Jury all on their own, without using any of the court system, and hold a trial, and carry out sentencing, all without the government getting involved. We don't because there are dedicated courts IRL, but in a strange frontier cyberland, you might want to re-think your conception of what "brigading" means, because there are no courts here.
Besides that, the community doesn't belong to you putt. Without us you are nothing. You may be maintainer, and operator, and for that we're grateful, but the community belongs to us, we created a lot of it somewhere else and took care to bring it here, and we'll take it with us if we leave. So, if the community says, "The gods have forsaken us! Our prayers go unanswered! We must do something ourselves", then that's actually our right to do that. The role of such a cybergod is to respond to the will of the volk, bringing righteous lightning from on high if the people cry out and the need is great enough to summon you. You can be a vengeful god and lay the smack down however you want, or an indifferent god who ignores the community's wishes, but in those cases that just means people will say, "Bad Deity, No Universe," and stop believing in you.
Not adopting "we're all guilty". That's projection. Personally, I think: Talk is cheap, let's see some action. Till then, I don't give a flying fuck if there are over nine thousand Sheriffs in town.
TL;DR: Fuck the police. There are no clearly defined rules to follow. Come at me bro. If we must break the rules to define them, so be it.
VieBleu ago
I like your lawless western theme. Over at /v/pizzagate we have specialty CTR bots too, so it is more like Westworld, but a lot less pretty.
you-are-me ago
My theme has a bit more subtlety than that. It is a proven methodology discovered in the BBS era which ultimately serves to preserve and protect online communities by illustrating how lawlessness was handled by the pros who built the nation that produced this lawless cyberspace in the first place. The subversive agenda is carried out in hopes that voat may also persevere in the face of great adversity from competing enemies and hostile native savages.
In the real world there are more than just shills pushing ideologies. There are also patriots who band together to defend our valued volk.
VieBleu ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf2zVRKD80Q
The real world? with goats that are actually sane and fun to watch? It must be a dream.
you-are-me ago
No one can prove it's not a dream, so.... there's that.