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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NeedleStack ago

User deleted comments have their positive CCP removed

Every once in a while I go back and delete older comments of mine (for privacy reasons and to cut my comment page count total down/make my account more manageable). Does this mean if I continue to do so I'll continue to drop CCP? It's not a huge deal overall but I like the option of deleting older comments without incurring 'demerits'. I guess I should say it's a trade-off I am happy to live with.

PuttItOut ago

Yes, currently this will happen. We may have to fine tune these things.

I have always wanted to create a trialing delete like functionality at Voat that will either anonymize or delete your content based on x number of days.

NeedleStack ago

Thanks! I don't like the idea of automatically anonymizing or deleting older content. Making it optional would be alright if a user wanted that function but I wouldn't want that automated. There are some cool subs out there waiting to be discovered and if the older content got wiped, there would be shell subs all over the place. For example, CANCEL-CAT-FACTS found /v/ceramics and posted in there tonight. The last post before his was published something like 1.3 years ago. If older content was deleted people may not feel inspired to give a formerly dead sub new life. But building on older content would be fun.

Plus, 'legacy' posts and comments are valuable in terms of maintaining a 'museum/history of voat'.

Jixijenga ago

Yeah my subverse is as old as my account, I post my sci-fi writing there. If it's just deleted on a whim I might as well go back to reddit, most of my admittedly small audience doesn't have an account on here while some of them do have accounts over there.

I post my writing elsewhere but I like to also post it on here for quick feedback.

NeedleStack ago

Thanks, this topic has been bothering me all night and I woke up thinking about it. Deleting/anonymizing older content would destroy subs like yours. This is a move I would not support at all.

It takes me several minutes sometimes to find content for my subs (it's not that easy finding decent bookbinding tutorials for example). If all that were to be wiped? What a colossal waste of time and effort to provide content for a site that's built on content!

SaneGoatiSwear ago

needle you don't have a say anymore. pay attention.

NeedleStack ago

Yes, I'm well aware of the ever-tightening restrictions on our 'free' speech here.