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.
thrus ago
The issue I see with this is how to decide on the vote number? if it is a set number burner accounts become an issue for larger subs, if it is a percentage this could be just as easy to abuse for small subs or nearly worthless to small subs if there is a minimum number of votes required. the big thing I see though is to not allow for voting in of mods only out or there could be some major reasons for people to use burner accounts.