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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I_am_a_robot ago
That linked to the /r/technology drama on reddit. Regardless of people's opinions on the question-mark rule, that is a very very different scenario. The question mark rule was clearly stated in the sidebar and was being applied fairly and evenly. If we don't want moderators to have minor technical rules that's one thing, but I think we need to be clear that that's all that happened. That's a huge difference from moderators having secret unpublished rules censoring specific content as was the case on /r/technology. In addition, I got the feeling that most of the response from the community had more to do with the mod's political views than with their moderation. Again, if we don't want those kinds of rules that's fine, but the community should focus on that not the fact that they don't agree with the mod's opinion on certain unrelated issues. Voat is supposed to be a free community so people shouldn't be going on these types of witch-hunts with anybody who dares to have a different opinion from themselves. Too many people on Voat seem determined to turn this site into a circlejerk where only approved opinions are allowed