Now that I have your attention, I have a confession to make: I lied.
Well sort of… because Voat 2.0 doesn’t exist yet, but it will in the future, and this thread is the first in a series of Quarterly Reviews we will be doing to get your feedback on what we need, what we need to improve, and the direction we need to move as a company and as a community.
I can finally announce that Voat’s features (software-wise) are now in the ballpark of a semi-functional platform. I’m not saying Voat is perfect, nor am I saying the features are mature, rather I am saying that we are nearing "acceptable" as a basic functioning platform.
But a basic functioning platform was never our end goal, it was just the first milestone we needed to hit. Now that we are approaching this milestone we need to lay out our future direction.
Voat doesn’t want to be a “clone” any longer. We want to stand up and proclaim our uniqueness. We want to put our differences on display and stake our future on them. Voat can’t survive without redefining ourselves, without evolving into something bigger, something better, something unique and new.
This is the post where we get to dream big, have no boundaries, no constraints, and live in world where everything is possible.
Hypothetical
You have an army of programmers, mountains of cash to burn, and you are the only board member: What does Voat 2.0 look like?
Thread is marked Anon
Canary
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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8457435? ago
Nearly all social media tends towards echo chambers. Why is this? I think on many sites, including Voat, there's a very simple explanation. The behavior of downvotes is intended to hide material that's either inappropriate or spam. In reality most people who do downvote don't downvote because material is inappropriate or spam, but because they disagree with it. So things people disagree with get hidden away. For a platform that's trademark is literally "have your say™" I think this is undesired behavior since it comes with the addendum, "and it won't even be hidden so long as more than 50% agree with it!"
How to do this? One idea is to start using preselected tags for posts: funny, bitter, informative, troll, spam, etc. All of these tags - except for spam would increase the rating of a post. A sufficient number of spam tags would alert janitors who could remove the post or remove the ability of people misusing the spam tag to label further posts as spam. Posts would not be ranked with numbers but instead by their most commonly cited tag. However, hovering over the tag of a post would still show the breakdown of tags, similar to how scrolling over the date now shows you the exact time something was posted.
I think this would enable more diverse range of thought. It's sad seeing everything turn into echo chambers of the most commonly held view, even if that most commonly held view might only be a slight plurality over other views. So long as that plurality downvotes other views, that's all that gets seen.
8460904? ago
I agree. Though many defend down votes, in reality they are used much more to censor speech than as intended, to fight spam and trolls. Down Voters are censoring free speech, plain and simple, by down voting any title or user they simply disagree with. They see themselves as upholding free speech, but in reality, are the ones who drive away anything they disagree with. Down voters are in real life, the same safe space folks they rail against.