I have made a decision to alter and/or remove various restrictions on Voat. I’ve thought a lot about this and it’s something both @Atko and I believe needs to be reevaluated.
Voat has always had a problem with spam. @Amalek would spam posts and hijack the new queue making it unusable. MH101 and then later @SaneGoatiSwear would hijack comment pages making them unusable. The rules Voat uses were put in place in to combat this behavior. They are old rules, mostly remaining unchanged from the initial versions of this site. Most, if not all, of the rules were in direct response to spam attacks. It was never Voat’s intention to limit non-spam accounts, but this is what has happened as an indirect result of these rules.
Voat will not keep in place a system that permanently limits a segment of users from debating and conversing. This isn’t Free Speech as I see it or as I want it.
Voat will shortly be going live with a new code base, and I want to have a new system designed and ready for when this happens, so I am posting this announcement to get feedback from the community.
The main areas of concern:
- Commenting restrictions on negative CCP accounts that aren't spamming their comments
- Limiting any account that spam comments
TL;DR
We need to allow unpopular opinions while preventing comment spam.
How do we do it?
All options are on the table
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
view the rest of the comments →
Vhaine ago
Putting any person or people in charge of deciding what is or isn't spam seems like a really bad idea. Just hide comments with enough negs. Id rather decide for myself if I care enough to look.
Crensch ago
Imagine a username that goes around and lies on purpose. Every comment. Constantly. In order to make himself seen and heard.
No downvotes can stop him.
Now there's 10 of them.
Or 20. Paid for.
Only some small amount of mods or admins or council members to deal with them. Only nobody can, because they're not spamming.
Every political post, and comment in that post, is now responded to by 20 of these "users".
No hail of downvotes can stop them. 20 clicks of downvotes by five real users to even hide them - if they don't get upvoted a bit by each other.