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
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Rainy-Day-Dream ago
can you give the users more control of the site? like being able to voat out power mods?
PuttItOut ago
Soon. (and this time I mean it) Soon soon.
Citizen ago
I've thought about this a great deal. In my opinion, the best solution would be a declaration that a subverse belongs to its users and not to its mods. On That Other Site, subs belong to the mods to do with as they please. By stating that subs belong to the users, abuse of mod powers becomes a thing that you can explain.
With that said, I'm not sure how to handle a sudden influx of users who have the intent of disrupting a community. For example, let's say /v/powerboats has an active community that loves all things nautical, including sailboats, and not just powerboats. Let's say /v/motorboats mass subscribes to /v/powerboats and tries to oust the existing community. I'd say the community that previously existed should have priority, even if the new community has numerical superiority.
Although I would imagine this would be a lot less of a problem than a single rogue mod saying, "I own you."
captainstrange ago
Let the person who created the subverse decide. Like a big experiment. That way the users on here can adapt to any attempts to rule-lawyer.
10249397? ago
that would not work for /v/feminism, as the original creator of the sub was a squatter and would delete anything posted in the sub before mod logs were implemented, then passed through 4 or 5 hands before it died and i gained control. the latest ~150 subscribers are there from the troll nature the sub now has, with maybe 1 or 2 of the original ~580 subscribers still being active on other parts of the site.
That 1 person still posts like the place has not changed, but the new crowd is decently active. the pro feminism content is either down voted, or ignored in single digits, while the troll content gets 50+ up votes on a regular basis. it is rather amusing to watch the silent community judge content on its merits instead of "rallying around the vagina's".