I can't stand by and watch stuff like this happen around here. I will not support subverses (by featuring them or making them defaults) with moderators who impose questionable rules such as "your post has to end with a questionmark". Moderators need to calm their tits and focus on nurturing and growing their communities. Rules can always be bent and what better time to bend the rules then now, while Voat is still growing and under development?
I am thankful for moderators who help keep Voat spam-free and I respect your work. I really do. I started working on automoderator for comments and submissions and your job will be made much easier when this is implemented, but for the time being, moderators need to relax and focus on removing spam and eventual illegal content. If I submit a new post and it gains some traction (hundreds of comments, views and upvoats), and my post gets removed because I broke a rule by forgetting to include a question mark in my submission title... well, I would be pissed. People take removal of their comments and submissions very seriously and moderators must think twice before removing stuff if they want to avoid offending users. Voat has a ranking process where time acts as gravity and older posts will eventually fall off the frontpage. Voat also has automatic public moderation logs and everything you remove will still be visible in these modlogs and your actions may be questioned by the community, just like what happened yesterday.
This action can be reverted if /askvoat mods can convince us that the issue has been dealt with or if some other, less restrictive community takes over.
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WoodrowWilsonLong ago
I don't really think the answer here is heavy-handed admins instead of heavy-handed mods. If a sub has a rule and a post breaks that rule, it should be removed. If every sub allowed everything except illegal content eventually every sub would turn into mindless drivel like /r/me_irl or /r/funny. It is rules and strong enforcement of these rules that makes great subs. Just look at /r/asoiaf: back when the sub had strict rules about content being restricted to analysis posts and book-related content it thrived. Content was interesting and there was a lot of in-depth discussion. Now that the moderators have become lax on enforcing the rules, new, low-effort content has wormed its way into the sub and taken over the first three pages. While there are still very interesting analyses and discussions in /r/asoif, it's just not what it once was. At the end of the day, it's easier for the user to upvote content with a low entrance-barrier than it is to upvote a 4 page long treatise on the Dornish plot even if the treatise is more interesting.
I think the anger directed at @She was entirely undeserved. @She did the job of a moderator, removing posts that break the rules. I have yet to see any evidence that @She removed posts that did not break any of /v/askVoat's rules.
I would like to remind everyone that it was not heavy-handed moderators that led to of reddit, it was heavy-handed admins.