While you are thinking, the kids abusing downvoat are winning. You are going to be left with only them, and the site will be in jeopardy. Restrict the downvoat to a reasonable cap, or most people you want on this site will be gone.

restricting votes is pretty much restricting speech, which I thought was something we didn't want to do around here.

It creates a second class of citizens and frankly is a big turn off.

I would rather have the ability to vote however I like without worrying about some artificial cap

Pre-vote Check

The finer details would have to be worked out, though something like this would force trolls to maintain many active accounts (active for the purpose of this is something @Atko and @Puttitout would have to come to an agreement on) to allow them to brigade.

It means that users who are unable to visit for a short time would need to be active for the period of time required before they could cast votes again, but in this time they could comment still and discuss as well as get a feel for if the atmosphere of the site has changed much in their absence.

But it is also interesting to see how many people agree on a given topic. So maybe we need two types of score - one for how much a comment adds to the discussion, and one for how much people agree with it.

@Atko If you want to avoid the issue with shills, put the same restriction on upvoting as you do on downvoting (i.e. new accounts need to earn the right to upvote). If you want to avoid the karmawhores using an 'upvote this' comment to get their 100 CCP, restrict it to CCP earned in default subs only, then police the defaults that refuse to mod the karmawhoring threads.

Oh noo my fee fees are hurt.

he has half a dozen or so aliases amalek kelama are the two i see the most, that idiot is just toxic

oh great we can go back to 50 spam posts a day by that fuck tard amalek

Lol, you can't even provide proof. What a fucking loser.

Oh yeah, this current system is shit. *nvm it was fixed 3 hours ago

Lol, you still haven't provided proof. "Everybody knows" isn't proof.

Brigading is organized. Can you show me where a group of people organized to just downvoat you? And @atko hates brigading, if you were actually brigaded, I'm sure you can try contacting him. You weren't censored, you're allowed to spread your ideas, on a new account. I'd love to see where people organized your "brigading", I'd love to see where you got downvoated before you started spamming. So far, you've told people all this huge pile of bullshit "I spam because I'm censored", and have never backed it up with any proof.

Oh yeah, the new school year started recently. I should ask, how is 4th grade so far?

I know there's about a thousand comments, but what about requiring a certain number of upvotes per day/week/month to continue being able to downvote?

Its fine but moderators will need to start paying attention to how much manipulation is going on.

Frankly it would have just been easier to ban accounts that abused the system and would probably cause less problems. Lurking more and absorbing the sites culture a bit before having a full account is not a bad thing. The second you open the door for people to easily shitposting and ruin threads just by getting a handful of friends/new accounts together it never stops.

Figure out a way to keep your users honest otherwise you will lose the current "feel" of the site. There are plenty of places to post anonymously and act like an idiot, don't let that happen here. Do not entertain these types in the slightest.

Older accounts without access can only blame themselves. Change needs to happen in this world and nothing is going to happen without people doing the work necessary. That means contributing to the site and making yourself useful.

Those who lurk and still do nothing deserve nothing. We all must act.

I suppose it's possibly you use (say) bcrypt for associating the IP address - can we trust your competency on this subject?-) If you just use (say) salt+SHA256, the original IP is easily reversible by the reason that there are so limited number of IPv4 addresses.

Now, the story might be different if you supported IPv6 as well..

Just spit-balling a couple of things here....

IP-based rules can be troublesome for people with roommates or living in housing like college dorms. It is also a problem for companies - you may have users working inside a corporation that all come from the same public IP. You want those people because they may have insider info to share on the corp they work for. (Note - you just want them to be able to use the site as normal from their company, if they are smart they wouldn't post sensitive company info FROM the company's network, but if they can't fully use the site AT work, they may not chose it as their platform of choice. If you are a member of a community, using the site as a normal user at work is a part of being in that community)

Base-lining is critical. SIEM systems seem like they could be of high use, here. I know of a product that got its start in the nuclear energy industry watching small bits of info at incredibly fast real-time rates with tons of data (talking about many thousands of events per second). The product isn't TOO expensive, maybe in the 50-100k range to get started. This product would baseline the info on voat habits in real-time and be able to alarm or take action on anomalies. It can also be configured to look for specific patterns (correlation rules) and take action on those. Actions would include - quarantine the IP for a certain amount of time, restrict voat rights to user(s) or source IPs for a certain amount of time, notify sysadmins, and just about anything else you can think of, assuming you have an API for voat that can be used. It is designed to be open so that it can inter-operate with any application.

I'm not mentioning the platform name because I'm not here to promote a product of any kind and I don't have an affiliation with that company. I have just used that particular product a lot and I am an expert in it's use and deployment and have found it to be the best in it's field. I have been managing SIEM systems for over 10 years and have experience with most of them (splunk, ibm, rsa, arcsight, etc)

This is what I do for a living, so hit me up if you need anything. I'd be happy to help.

You can't hold your leaders accountable until you learn to hold YOURSELVES accountable by putting your own views under public scrutiny.

Finally! Now I don't have to post 20 times a day just to downvote biased opinions.

SCP? Secure, Contain, Protect?

This announcement is a good test to see how many actual real users are on Voat and can down vote.

307 real users so far past 100ccp

In the minute I spent looking at this post, I have seen more downvotes here than in the rest of my time on Voat. Just something to think about.

Yep, the in-sub restrictions need to go, too. If you want to stop brigading, then stop brigading in some better way than to clip the wings of anyone who's not popular. I'd almost rather have reddit than that.

I'd like to point out that it takes close to zero time to hash every ip, if the salt is known, and so you are barely protecting the users by hashing their ips. If you used something like scrypt you could make it slightly more costly, but this would cripple your servers with your current scheme.

you'll have to elaborate on that; i have only seen evidence that he is working with all the best intentions.

Damn, that feature was one of the main reasons that I respected Voat. It's kind of silly that I actually put effort into my comments, and now any jackass can downvote away after contributing nothing.

Yes! I thought this was the only thing reddit did better than Voat. Good thing it's removed!

I made a suggestion about combating vote manipulation here but it was largely ignored. The idea is a bit too long to write down again in full.

This is very disappointing because us early adopters were taught to use upgoats and downgoats respectfully--after having read and processed the comment. You are inviting downgoats by people who wish to silence freedom of speech based on their "triggers". These same people would have found it difficult to remain in our community long enough to attain 100 points because their ideas and personalities are often garbage. Well, let's bring the garbage in, I suppose!

What about OCP?

voting IP addresses are stored encrypted and we have no way to reverse this encryption

Can you please use the correct term? It's called hashing (and I know you know). I have to correct this misinformation all the time on stack overflow. Please stop spreading it, thanks.

Need to dump the per-sub restrictions, too.

I also think something needs to be done. I don't downvoat very much, but it pisses me off when I find that I want to and can't. I'm sick of seeing garbage about Hillary's fucking email sail to the top like it was newsworthy or something.

This would be great if downvoats are used for their intended purpose. Let's keep this from becoming second Reddit, and remember upvoat means it stimulates conversation, and downvoats are NOT "I disagree with you" buttons.

With this new feature, haters will arise.

Again I say that I liked the old Slashdot comment moderation scheme.

You would randomly be assigned five or more moderation points. You could up mod / down mod comments.

They had meta-moderation where anyone on the site could look at your moderation and see if you were doing a good job.

You only had a few points to use, so you would think about it a bit.

Meta moderation kept people a bit in line. Some abuse, but not too much.

And comments were thresholded between -1 and +5 so that the good stuff could rise to the top and crap could be buried.

You could add individual modifications to points. Old users could get a bonus. Foes could get negative mods just for your viewing.

If you got upmodded, you got more karma.

Your rate of getting moderation points was also some formula, depending on your time at the site and your karma (I think).

It had lots of benefits, but then people went to stupid digg which can be totally scammed because anyone can vote then to reddit where people can downvote and make others have bad feels.

Good! Downvoates are a feature of your website that Lurkers use. I think lurkers use this feature more than any other usergroup, and this impedes them. Why would you want less lurkers to use Voat, for the trade off that some of them start commenting? Having more hits on your websites gets more people that contribute on their own.

I find it strange you are trying to solve those problems by restricting the downvoat, because the problems you're giving are solved by allowing people to downvote: A brand which wants to advertise on voat will need a bigger investment* as more people are downvoting bad content (like spam/ads). *The company will need to buy more upvotes, invest in a better designed meme... (A professionally designed "meme" can actually be a good contrbution, it can be funny, creative, insightfull. Whatever the average user wants to see, a company can produce.)

Still restricting votes to an IP is something I still disagree with. What about family's or roommates? As a company you want people to talk about voat offline. It's word-of-mouth advertising and gets people to join voat and to stay on voat.

You were asking for a solution? What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Should new accounts be restricted because they could be malicous? Should people not downvoat as much as they upvoat? Should people comment more?

I think "tagging" can be a good feature. On reddit mods tagged content as advertisement or whatever, with the enhanced extencion I tagged alot of users with "don't believe his lies" or "the real from youtube". Users here dont want to be downvoted because their comment is controverisial; ask people why they downvoated! Adding an extra click to the downvote button already dissuades people. Ask them if they disagree or think the comment is misplaced (Works better in my native language: Dutch, it means "not funny/rude with respect to the context"), malinformed (sortsighted, faulty reasoning or wrong), unethical, spam.

Instead of restricting and censoring, you should warn and inform voaters about bad content and herd them to good content.

The amount of downvoats in Askvoat has tripled in the last 24 hours. This was not a good idea.

Please note that you can only vote once from a single IP address

Does that mean that I can only down/up vote 1 time per topi on my pc @ home? Not that I want to do that twice but my girlfriend is also on the same pc......

Hm, maybe require the user to comment if they give a downvote, but that comment can be downvoted without the same requirement.

Example: I downvote you, requiring me to make this comment. Now since I downvoted you, anyone can downvote me and they don't have to comment on why. This requirement may be lifted after certain criteria have been met for each subverse, such as time of membership, number of comments made and how well you comments have been received in the particular subverse.

I wish you would just remove downvotes entirely. They're used mostly as a "I disagree" button. And no, I don't care how it's SUPPOSED to be used, that's how it's used by the majority of people. Just let people upvote or not vote at all. Let good content rise to the top without punishing unpopular opinions.

It's not brigading, people were downvoating you because you were fucking spamming.

Please note that you can only vote once from a single IP address

Doesn't this cause problems as voat grows though? University students are sort of screwed by this, and dynamic IP users are as well.

What happens if 2 people with the same IP have conflicting votes? Or what if 3 or more people from the same IP vote on something, with conflicting votes?

@atko, please don't do this. This is the primary reason I was excited to come here, as well as why I've loved it here since that other place. This rule created more thoughtful discussion and it made a downvoat valuable (instead of it being an easy disagree button). Voat will now no longer have anything in place to distinguish itself from reddit. This will not bring anything good for the site and its community as a whole.

This is just throwing out the baby with the bath water.

I had no problem with the restrictions. I found it was a good feature to keep people from opening throwaway accounts just so they could be downvoat trolls. It also encouraged me to participate more so that I could gain downvoat privileges.

What if you earn downvoats and have a limited supply? So say, every time someone upvoats your comment, you get a downvoat to use.

Bad decision dude. If you're going to make a change, at least ask the community first and have a poll.

Maybe it would be possible to protect from bot accounts with time measuring for actions: supra human speed? probably not human. -> feed em captchas

To protect from corporations sending armies of shills: look for shared ips and for group-voting: systematically (at 80% or more?) upvoting one another and mass downvoting counter opinions.

Besides, it's sad that "karma" is collected, summed and displayed to users: it creates fear of being downvoted and incites users to express sheepish opinions. It's killing another voat-like site.

@Atko did you get rid of She yet?

Thank you so much! :D

That pisses me off. I worked hard to comment and add and now you just throw that away. Fuck youm thanks for making me feel even worse about how I waste me life on this site. Jesus, I am almost wanting to go back to reddit.

Another idea came to mind how about setting up the system so that no user is allowed to upvoat/downvoat a post without actually clicking on the post and checking it out? Like at the moment if I wanted I could voat rampage the entire front page without checking out a single link or what it's about. It would be great if there was a way to say - No voating unless you actually check out a post.

Well I think if you guys add a report button to the posts and have good mods or a system by which if the number of reports about a post exceeds some arbitrary number it will be handled that would be great. I get your point about corporations having thousands of employees, but you forget we're a lot greater in numbers than them. Fear not alpha goat Atko we will brigade regulate Voat, I mean that's a big point of it right? In the meantime why I no can voat on this post? https://vid.me/iF1v

I would like if all upvotes and downvotes of a user were removed from the entire site when a user is banned. I am not sure if this is viable or not though.

You mean all that sweet karma whoring I did was for nothing!? A damn shame I tell you. A damn shame.

Incognito doesn't change your IP it just doesn't store browsing information on your box.

Could there be a ratio by chance? Say encourage upvoting by requiring 10 upvotes for each downvote you're able to use? Sure people could abuse it by giving random ups to down someone, but for the most part it would at least encourage people to look at the bright side before turning negative.

@Atko, I know you've gotten a lot of suggestions and comments.I know I'm late to the party, but please hear me out: why not adopt a system like Slashdot? If there's one thing they got right, it was the way they handled comments. Have a few different tags (that are filterable) that people can mark a comment as. As more and more people mark comments in these categories (make "Troll" a category, for example), people can set their filters to get rid of certain posts and arrange them in different ways. Users can have a section in their profiles that show a distribution graph displaying what percentage of posts they have in what categories. Bonus points if you make it so each comment has a little graph that pops up when you hover over a certain spot, that shows a similar graph, but for the specific comment (so users can still see how (and how many) people are reacting to it). Comments that have an even distribution across multiple tags (where one of which is "Troll" or "Spam") can be labeled "Controversial" and will bypass filters until enough users make a consensus. This method gives you so many ways to sort comments to get rid of unwanted content (spammers, etc).

Highly controversial comments can be instantly flagged for the mods, so they can take a look at, making their job easier.

This gives the benefit of people having a nice little feature in their settings to filter out all comments from other users that have a 50%+ (or whatever) "Troll/Spam Rating". The trolls, brigaders, and spammers would be dead before they even got a chance to get started. People with high ratings like, "Insightful", "Witty", "Funny", etc. would get more visibility; and new users would have all their posts bypass all filters for their first ~10 or so posts until they have an established track-record of what they have to offer (so they get visibility, as well).

Get rid of karma. Two sites have tried to run on this model, and it's imploded them both. Really hope this message reaches you, man. I feel like princess Leia leaving a recording on r2d2. I'm 100% confident this would work.

EDIT: Riffing on the initial idea and added some extra stuff.

May as well just rename the place Reddit 2.0 now.

This is you...

Oh somebody posted a thread that said vote me please. GG, system broken. Go back to reddit. GG.

Go cry more, or continue to build a better system. But whatever you do, don't revert back to old changes!

No. NO. NOOOOOOOOOO.

I was SOOOOO close.

I liked the comment/downvoat restrictions as it made alternate accounts less prone to brigading.

Could you create an admin toggle that says "these subs don't count?" so that all these "upvoat me" subs can upvoat all they want but won't actually do anything for your totals?

Let the VOAT Games now begin !!!

I spent months making comments to get points. This morning I was finally at 98 and was excited to give my first downvoat. All that work was for nothing. fucking pissed and probably not coming back here again fuck that shit

RIP

I down voted this and i don't know why.... this down vote power is too great for this goat.

Ideas? I have a couple:
1. Implement sub-wise downvoating limits and give them to the mods to implement or reject. Global limits were useless as you discovered.
2. Let there be mechanisms to get people earn upvoats. Again, this is best implemented by mods in their own subs. For example, people get the privilege to voat in a particular sub only when their comments get x number of of upvoats in that sub where the value of x is set by the top mod.

Differentiate between votes made by accounts above the threshold and votes made by accounts below the threshold.

Add additional content sorting options that disregard the below-threshold votes (and one that ignores downvotes completely).

Implement some sort of karma decay function. This necessitates regular activity to stay above the thresholds. You can't participate in one upvote party and then idle your account until needed.

On the backend, you should be able to see if shills/bots are trying to spin up a bunch of accounts quickly for a targeted manipulation op. Or detect networks of accounts that regularly upvote each other to maintain standby status.

Reddit number 2.

Honestly, solving this problem is super simple. Make downvotes a currency and cap it. Here are the business rules. I'm a game designer, so I am going to use the term "Player" for a Voat contributor.

1. Players have a pool of downvoats. We will call this the "wallet".
2. A Player's wallet can never exceed 25 available downvoats.
3. A Player's wallet is initially set to 0.
4. A Player's wallet decreases by 3 every 7 days if their wallet exceeds 5 downvoats. (Otherwise it stays at 5 or lower)
5. A Player's wallet can never decrease below 0.
6. A Player's wallet increases by 1 for every 5 comment upvoats that player receives. (Keep a static counter)
7. A Player's wallet increases by 1 for every 3 link upvoats that player receives for their submissions.
8. A Player's wallet decreases by 1 for each comment they downvoat.
9. A Player's wallet decreases by 1 for each link submission they downvoat.
10. If a Player's wallet ever reaches 0, they will be unable to downvoat anything.
11. No single Player may downvoat more than 50 items (comments or submissions) within a 30 day span.

The effects of this system is as follows:
1. Players are incentivized to contribute to the community to get downvoats they can spend.
2. The system punishes inactivity but never removes all downvoats from a Player unless they spend all of their downvoats explicitly.
3. Players will recognize the scarcity of the downvoats and act accordingly.
4. Even if Player's attempt to "rig" their downvoats they are limited to only 50 a month (if they are constantly regaining them).
5. In this system it would be very easy to spot fraud and abuse or botting to game the system with some basic statistical analysis. And another internal algorithm can monitor and correct that.
6. New Players are not prevented from downvoating completely. They still have to earn the privilege and prove themselves first.
7. If a Player loses interest in the site but comes back later on, they have to re-prove themselves for the privilege to downvoat.

Make it into a game, "Here is another anon user online now with less than 100ccp, exchange 3 messages and they get the option of giving you 25 CPP"

Or "submit something on one of the following 'new kid' subverses"

"5cpp per captcha solved"

"Preform a turning test on this suspected Bot"

"Check out this random post and let them know what you think 5cpp"

Or "pay 5$ to skip " like metafilter does

Did you ever stop to think that maybe your posts are just fucking retarded and that it has nothing to do with being brigaded? Because your comments are fucking retarded.

I think he is @ididit now

Oh for shit's sake, Why don't you just go ahead and bend me over a table and shove a broom up me arse voat, then ask me to sweep your damn floor with it. I JUST GOT MY HUNDRED TODAY

Although on a calmer note, I can often just kinda tell when somebody has downvoted me because they just disagree with me.

What about having 10 comments scoring over a +2 or +3 to be able to downvote? You'd then have to have at least a few posts get positive net scores in order to downvote, which would reduce spammers slightly.

There is no "perfect system" as someone will always find a way to game it.

We like the old rule. Please bring back the old rule.

Taking away the penalty for being a social retard who can't hold a civil conversation? Yeah, it's going to be a bitch. SRS didn't get any traction here BECAUSE of those restrictions. Now that they've been removed, everyone should prepare themselves for the brigades and the ultra-moralist keyboard warrior dogpiles. Bad move, @Atko

Great. Get ready for the rage/troll downvoaters.

Winter is coming.

I started a discussion on it last night, there has to be a way to stop manipulation on this site.

https://voat.co/v/ideasforvoat/comments/413626

find some way to count active days only rather than raw account age. That could be a bit tricky but it's certainly doable.

I hope he sees this. This is a great fix to a problem that was sure to come up if account age was implemented.

I agree with what you are doing. It was obvious that the system was being heavily gamed. It will still be brigaded and gamed, but now we have it more on equal ground. Keep up the good work ATKO.

On a side note... now what we need is a hide button to hide posts so it will not clog our newsfeed for HOURS with posts we have no interest in.

Hey @Atco, are you building a community of sheep so that they may follow the highest ranking voats, or a community of goats capable to forage for themselves?

Let the goats find the 'nourishment' they appreciate. Give them a chance to 'follow' whom they like, vote or no vote.

What do you say?

that's a good point.

I would agree that the upvoat brivades damaged the old system, but did not destroy it. It should be tweaked, not scrapped.

I really like the referral links because that also keeps people from brigading from inside of Voat as well. However, I'm not sure how you would not run into issues due to people being in /v/bestof or similar and then going to try to comment on the page itself.

An idea for an alternative? Keep the same system for posts that are under something like 70 or so upvotes. This number would rise as Voat gets bigger, but this would allow posts not drop as hard because of disagreement, but spam or marketing doesn't get as high. After a post goes over ~70 (or the limit at the time) everyone is free to downvote it instead of just those that are above the SCP/CCP.

idea: new account can neither upvoat nor downvoat for a specific amount of time e.g. a day, 30 days, etc.

I think Voat should keep this restriction to help keep out the trolls. Trolls don't contribute posts and only make snotty comments intended to draw someone into an asine argument.

I think ideally you'd restrict upvoats and downvoats to like 10 a day. Increase that by 10 for every active "week" (7 days total with at least one positively-voated comment that day) until 100, then remove restrictions.

I have faith that, together, we will create a system that is fair and beneficial to all. Just give it some time. /u/Atko /u/Puttitout and friends We are in good hands.

This can't end well.

Give it based on account age. If you've been here for less than a week you get 1 downvote a day.

Something like that.

"(voting IP addresses are stored encrypted and we have no way to reverse this encryption)"

Is that the case with user profiles, comments and posts as well?

You can't hold your leaders accountable until you learn to hold YOURSELVES accountable by putting your own views under public scrutiny.

Not a big fan of this. I actually liked how the restrictions made people contribute before they could downvote everything they disagreed with, perhaps even convincing them to refrain from doing so once they had the power.

well this is gonna shit up the front page. PREPARE FOR DOWNVOAT=DISAGREE ECHOCHAMBER SPAM.

The problem is that any system you utilize will eventually be figured out and gamed. The upside to that is social media uses different "point systems" (likes, faves, retweets, upvotes, etc) and the ways people game it is predictable.

To me the solution would come from randomly changing the way posts make it to the front page, without people feeling like they're being cheated. You can't game the system if you don't know how the system works.

So for example, every Tuesday in August means that posts with the most upvotes 33 minutes after posting makes it to the front and on Wednesday posts that averages 5/upvotes per second makes the front and Thursday the ratio between upvotes and downvotes determines the ranking. Friday what makes the front is decided by the users located in Germany, Great Britain and New Zealand and Saturday everyone subscribed to v/filmdiscussion unknowingly determines what makes the front.

@Atko, a have a small but simple idea and I would like to know how you feel about it. It could be a real game changer and set Voat apart from the competition: remove downvoting, but keep upvoting. After all, the very logo of Voat is the upvote button.

What is the purpose of downvoting? They cause more harm than good. They are easily abusable and can be used by the hivemind to silence or discredit unpopular opinions. They are fairly redundant. Let upvotes do the talking. If you don't support content, ignore it; if you do, upvote!

I personally don't use Facebook, but I think they had the right idea by not including a "dislike" button, which would be analogous to downvoting.

Make the system so you can't downvote more than you upvote

Or you can't downvote more than your CCP

As a person who contributed to get 100 ccp legit and somewhat enjoyed it (and it took several weeks), what the actual fuck. Not a good move in my opinion. I think the people who took the time to contribute should be rewarded by having the power to moderate submissions with downvoats, they should find a way to ban upvoat threads instead.

I don't agree with this. I think limited downvoating was something that made Voat different from other places and it was a force for good. Wouldn't it be possible to restrict or even (with caution) ban those CCP farming subverses? I see that as something that is designed to circumvent the system and is breaking Voat. If my post is even visible in this huge mass, I'd welcome discussion on this.

What about some sort of power level system? Like if you've been here longer or are a more active user your upvoat is more powerful or something? Then you could have two stats on posts, number of upvoats/downvoats and then the collective power of those voats. Voat power could be collected many different ways, commenting and posting among the most obvious, and getting downvoated a lot could nerf your voat power or something. Im sure this would have issues but i think its flexible enough that they could be ironed out...

I really want to be able to say that my voat power level is over 9000.

I am not using my downvoats until I have earned them. I will wait until I am worthy of them.

Here's the one reason I disagree with this policy change:

Yes it's still gamable. But the one thing voat has more of than reddit (ironically) is diversity.

reddit speaks with one hivemind. On voat, without all the downvoting brigades some good but unpopular opinions have a chance to be expressed. I suppose in the long run, that advantage will dissipate but for a little while it's been nice.

Could you make people comment everytime they want to vote? Sure there would be a lot less voting, but on the upside it could make discussion more interesting if users embrace it.

Okay, so now my brother and I have to use separate ips in order to vote? Or am I understanding this wrong?

I think I like this change. As somebody with 80ish whatever imaginary points, am I allowed to downvote now? But I'm not sure it's a good thing, as it could lead to abuse.

Disappointing. Earned meant being a non-asshole. Circle upvoating could b circumvented with a time element. not fair to all, but still means earning and bwing a non asshole.

Pay to vote. http://planetawesome.org/, http://www.bitvoat.com/, https://tyger.ac

I welcome this change. Votes were too weaponized earlier. User moderation is tricky to solve thanks to users being humans.

Please don't just add more hoops to jump through. People who are doing this shit for a living have more patience than the average user. Money is a great motivator.

RIP my hard work of getting 100 CCP.

Why not just let a downvoat cost one (or two - or ten) upvoats? Maybe even let upvoats cost one (or two - or ten) upvoats. That gives value to voats and people will voat more responsibly.

I have 153 CCP. If downvoats cost 10 CCP I can downvoat 15 times and then they are gone. If I want to downvoat more I have to earn new upvoats.

@atko

Hey brother, this is an unpopular move on the admin's part. This may be a great time to learn the art of gracefully reversing a bad decision. It will win you HUGE points with your userbase for them to witness your humility.

Thank you for all your hard work.

DAMNIT. I just got enough CCP to downvote.

We have a static ip address for my home (business class Internet) and this will prevent my roommates from voating on threads because I already did.

Also, this will prevent folk who voat at work (wasting time, not as a job) from voating as well.

I understand the thought process, but do not like the solution. Hopefully ya all will continue thinking on it and come up with a better solution in the future.

Thank you for your continuing work.

In regards to the large corporation problem: Perhaps it would not be too much of an inconvenience to real user to make them reply to a thread or start a new one, say 3,4 or 5 times before they earn the privilege to upvote and downvote?

Damn. Honestly I really liked the whole getting to 100 to downvote. I just got there last week too.

Terrible idea, the problem is that if you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. That is it's not necessarily the system that is at fault but rather the idiots abusing it. A better idea would be to just have a ratio of up votes to down votes so that you have to earn down votes, and have a limit to the number of down votes that you're able to earn. For example 1 up vote for every 5 down votes to a limit of about 10 down votes.

I mean you're always going to have a problem with shills and brigades abusing the system, no matter how inconvenient you make it. Just removing features does nothing to address the problem.

When working on solutions to this, keep in mind lurkers who don't' overly participate outside of voating.

My reddit account for example, which I logged into pretty much daily, is over 6 years old, charter member, annual participation in secret santas, etc, has only 4 link karma and 1500 comment karma. I rarely comment, usually in small serious conversations (no +400 sarcastic/meme replies for me).. but I would consider myself to be an active participant in the experience, spending time in the new queue, trying to make sure good content is hitting the front page of subs.

You can't hold your leaders accountable until you learn to hold YOURSELVES accountable by putting your own views under public scrutiny.

No thanks.

Well, I'm already seeing tons of shithead downvoats. Not good at all for the community, but I trust in the leadership here! Hope we get a better solution to this problem soon.

This is just terrible.

It's uncontrollable. CCP begging will just move outside voat.

How about make a new account wait a week or at least a day to downvote. That should keep spammers and hacks from rigging it to much.

voting IP addresses are stored encrypted and we have no way to reverse this encryption

Do you mean hashed? Also, does this mean that the "you have to upvote more than you downvote" BS is gone?

i'm sorry to see that happen.

See, it took you about a month to be able to downvote. At the same time, upvoting had no restrictions and organized groups could and have pushed whatever they want to the frontpage. How is this not a problem to you?

Why can't people just be decent act on a personal level? Fucking interest groups and advertising disrupt true thought processing and peer based evaluation. Y'all should add a tag to posts from business servers so people can see fast if it's manipulation or individual thought.

@Atko I've said this before: Make the ability to purchase voats. Allow for the trading and collecting of said voats. Charge a certain amount for packs or blocks of voats. Weight different types of voats. This way if a mega corp wants to game the system it will automatically benefit the system and if someone wishes to immediately partake in voating they too can purchse a pack/block of voats and depending on the type they purchases will be able to have certain privileges too. For those that do not want to purchase voats they can submit content or participate for a certain amount of voats. It all benefits the system. But it really works well if we can trade in bulk our voats... Like badges, but differently weighted voats. Say I have a Golden Voat worth about $20 US - I use it to upvoat a certain submission - it is the equivalent of 20 regular everyday voats. Say you have an Unobtanium Voat that you purchased for $50 US and you use it to downvoat a submission - it is the equivalent of 50 regular downvoats. Either way the system makes money and supports the market of voating. A serious "put your money where your voat is" solution.

The solution to your example problem is to disable upvoats for new accounts similar to how downvoats are disabled until after they get some CCP. I get that you don't want the "upvoat me" threads, but removing the downvoat restrictions won't make it any harder for large corporations to astroturf.

voting IP addresses are stored encrypted and we have no way to reverse this encryption

Bull motherfucking shit. There are only 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses. If you can do whatever hash algo you're using one time for every time someone votes on something, you can sure as hell do it ~2.15 billion times. Hash algorithms are extremely fast.

It has to be hidden from /v/all because otherwise any sub could abuse this feature and push their content to the top of /v/all since nobody from the outside would be able to downvote.

I can't say I care too much if someone can downvote right away, but if I had to think of a better system, then it would probably involve limiting how much upvotes received for early comments contribute to overall CCP (and therefore the downvoting threshold).

Something like making only the first 5 upvotes count for each comment until you reach 100 total - so even if all comments from a single new user were upvoted, this person would still need 20 of those at the absolute minimum. It would prevent people from just slapping something like "DAE le reddit sucks xDDDD" early on a submission that becomes popular and getting >100 CCP in an hour.

Once the user passes 200 CCP (or any number significantly above the 100 threshold), the old comments could start being counted fully towards the total. It shouldn't happen immediately when the user meets the 100 CCP requirement since they could still get some downvotes and fall below 100 again; all comments counting all points immediately after would prevent this.

This is too bad. One of the largest, if not the largest, non-default sub is Reddit's coontown replacement: /v/niggers. Before each new post would more or less get an automatic downvote within 30 minutes, As you can imagine, lot of people do not agree with the sub. Now any random account with no activity can just go in and downvote stuff? This is already being seen on new submissions that, of course, all of a sudden have a higher number of downvotes then they ever did. It's not being done by subscribers or people who are actually there as coontown supporters, that's for sure.

Ah. Fair enough. I guess it works both ways.

I don't like this. I enjoyed downvoats being less common.

This will get ugly. Why do you insist on making voat more like reddit? We came here because we were sick of the latter in the first place!

What about if someone moves? When I move from my current home I don't want to lose the ability to vote.

What if the first (or first N) downvoats on something still require a privilege?

Tie the upvoat and downvoat system to a blockchain technology either running on ethereum or something like it.

https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/110/bitcongress-blockchain-based-voting-system

Then require 100 CCP over the last 30 days. As soon as an acocunt falls below 100 CCP in the last 30 days, remove downvoat ability and restrict upvoats to 20 per day. Require a registration to voat that utilizes a single bitcoin address registered to a single email account and a successful captcha.

Damn, I was 11 points away from 100, now the milestone is meaningless. Oh well :)

For ask long as VOAT's primary objective is to rank submissions and comments there will be attempts at manipulating the system. Consider the following options:

1. Drop the objective to rank posts NO VOTING AT ALL (turn the site into an information and opinion forum AND let people follow users whose contributions they value)

2. If the voting feature is retained then:
   a. make it obligatory for the voter to give a reason for his vote, perhaps from a short proforma list
   b. incorporate the voter's user ID

Okay everyone, we agree, we liked the restriction.

we can still do something about this. @Atko has made it clear that this is only temporary while they devise/implament a better system

I too wish they would have kept it up until the change was implamented, but he does have a point, and the consequenes either way were creating problems.

So what can we do? Keep making content and make sure to support good discussion and show that is what we stand for. Utilize this growth in downvoat potential and combat bad discussion really. Use the downvoat responsibly, and report the trolls/alt accounts. And above all, don't let a sour minority kill the mood. @Atko and @PuttItOut have my trust, and from recent events I believe that if they are working to make a system I'm willing to believe them.

Here's to hope and good luck boys.

edit: also here's an added idea, help find ways we can improve the system and post your suggested ideas for how the restriction can be done better at /v/ideasforvoat

I'll definitely be stewing something in light of these events

I don't think those are good arguments against it. They only focus on the NOW and not the FUTURE.

Yes, in its infancy you will have users who are "asking" for upvoats. But as your site evolves, the users who deserve/contribute/aren't pricks will be more prevalent

Honestly, I though it was one of the best way to keep shills, spammers, and non-dedicated site users away. I liked seeing less downvoats.

If you are going to stand firm with your decision, please devise a way to reward users who actually use voat vs spammers/brigaders.

A 4 year user with > 5000 CPP should be more trustworthy than a 0 day old account whos only purpose is to downvoat. (maybe make downvoats cost CPP?)

2cents

sniff.... and here i am with 92, tryna think of something witty to get me those last 8 points!

buzzkill.

Being unable to downvoat has actually limited my participation a bit. kinda hard to get any real feeling for a discussion when you can't voice your opinion. I am glad of the change.

Oh great, the people that come here and fucking whine about not being able to downvoat have won. Awesome. Starting to like this place less and less every day now..

So basically the only difference between Voat and Reddit now is that Voat has collected all of Reddit's trash that no one wanted around anyway. Good job guys, bravo.

By doing this, you are allowing massive social media manipulation groups to game the site.

A few examples:

Film marketers.

Video game marketers (Valve).

Lego.

SRS bullies.

GamerGate bullies.

Red Pill / Femanist troll groups.

Various chans (like 4chan).

Vegan bullies.

JDIF bullies.

... and so on.

This was a bad move on your part, and you really should know better and think of better alternatives.

Still, it's nice to know that you are trying to work on the website.

Alternatively we could just permaban people for obvious karmawhoring or give massive karma hits for it. Trusted moderators could be given this tool.

I really respect you trying to hone things here. Thank you. That said, I really liked earning the ability to downvote. That's my 2 cents

I do not like the idea of forcing people into a 100 different subs. I look at the front page occasionally and then go to the subs that I care about. I think a mixture of total CCP gained, account lifetime, and upvoats given could work well.

If you want to stop the "please upvote me" bullshit, crack down on the "please upvote me" bullshit. Don't just give them what they want.

I am completely against this. One of the reasons I decided to make this my online home were the CCP restrictions. They forced users to be establish them selves in the community and participate before they were allowed to have an incremental say in the content of the site. With the restrictions gone, there is nothing to keep communities with agendas from flooding in and brigading. This will without a doubt hurt the site.

As I said somewhere else: Completely revamp the upvote/downvote system. Upvote/downvote both should make a post more visible (pushing it upwards). After this is implemented you could add personal filters for most upvoted/ most downvoted, % based and so on.

The biggest upside of the system is that it will stimulate environment of "ignore the idiot", where people will learn that sometimes not touching the shit is actually better. This will completely remove the brigading problem since a post is either discussion worthy or not.

At least try it.

Maybe also tie up the comment counts. More specifically some index to indicate the depth of the comment trees in the comment section. A longer branches means more discussions/arguments.

You're making a serious mistake. I've seen more quality discussions here in the past three weeks than on reddit the past 6 months and thats because of the system that is/was in place. Take that away and the only post to make it to the top will be those that appeal to the lowest common denominator: stupid puns, funny comments. You're going to stifle discussion.

If this is for financial reasons then you could at least be up front about it.

Make upvoats and downvoats only available to those with 50 CCP instead of 100. Small enough for it not to be a nuisance for new users, but large enough that brigade/spam accounts can't do much without being found out.

It seems the problem this is trying to address is currently a non problem.

Completely agree! The vast iceberg of the community are the lurkers, for better or worse.

Why? People say stupid shit and deserve downvoats.

Limiting to one account per IP makes this site not attractive to people living together. My girlfriend created an account but we can't really browse at the same time. She'll lose interests and end up leaving.

This will stop multiple users at Coffee shops or any public free WiFi.

when will the invite only thing stop ?

Yeah, I rarely downvote anything anyways, I prefer the idea of aggregating content based on upvote vs no vote, and reserving downvotes for posts that truly deserve it. Downvote should not mean disagree. Also I didn't mind the 100 CCP limit, even if I'm still only halfway there after being here for a month, because it's much better than 100 comment/post limit. I hate when forums etc. use post limits, because I really don't post often unless I feel like I have something worth saying. Quality over quantity.

Idea: There's a limit to downvoats; it regenerates with time.

For example, new users could have a downvoat quota of 2dv/hour. This wouldn't leave them feeling useless, they could start right away, but they'd have a large incentive to contribute and increase the quote which would grow depending on factors such as (1) account age and (2) CCP.

If you manage to balance both variables you can make it so that new accounts with large amount of CCP wouldn't be able to circunvent the limits. To do so you'd need to design an "ideal user growth line". For example:

• >= 1 week AND >50 ccp. = 2 dv/hour
• >= 2 weeks AND >100 ccp. = 4 dv/ hour
• >= 3 weeks AND >150 ccp. = 5 dv/hour

If a user achieves more than 150 ccp but is only three weeks old, he would still fall into the third category. This prevents users from growing faster than a certain desired limit.

Basically Voat admins decide the desired growth curve and cap off extra benefits for users who climb too far too fast, or provide users who're falling behind with some of them.

The same principle could be applied to upvoats, although with larger numbers.

Paging @Atko so he can read the proposal.

Me too. Have a 101.

Just make the ccp limit scale with the size if the existing user base as it is the moment if account creation.

Hey @Atko my previous comment wasn't very constructive so I'd like to put another idea idea that I just thought of out there.

How about making it so that you can comment freely when you first make a new account but cannot initially upvoat or downvoat anything. This should prevent people or companies from quickly making fake accounts just to manipulate voats.

After commenting a certain amount of times (let's say 100 comments for example) in default subverses, the user will then unlock the ability to voat; providing that their upvoat/downvoat ratio is above a certain percentage to automatically filter out trolls/spam. A ratio of 0.35 or 0.4 should be low enough to prevent people from getting caught up in the filter by posting an unpopular opinion.

Alternatively, those who contribute interesting submissions or comments could unlock the ability to voat quicker if they receive a certain amount of CCP or SCP (Let's say 100 of either), again in default subverses to prevent cheating. This would give people an incentive to contribute good quality content whilst also making it significantly harder for people to cheat the system by making (or posting in) free upvoat subverses.

Welcome to the big time... a real shame that people cannot "play by the rules"...

But then again that is the "rule" for so many nowadays.

Keep the CCP requirement but also require commenting on the thread you're downvoating, that way if people don't have anything meaningful to say they'll be unable to downvoat as soon as they see an article they're biased too. (And if they spam a comment just to downvoat it would most likely result in a loss of CCP).

As a new user it simplifies it for me and makes it easier to access

But knowing how well downvoting goes ehh...Maybe the old way was ok the way it was.

@Atko, I have a suggestion: I like the idea of linking voting capabilities to comment creation rather than ccp. It would do a lot avoid the hive mind behavior seen on reddit, but still prevent brigading. Perhaps new accounts have a limited number of voats and can only upvoat on links. The more active you are, the more votes your account/IP is given per day. The trick would be to make it so that you couldn't just create a self-post and make a hundered comments of the word "the" to bypass said system. Perhaps your comments need some votes (whether up or down) and/or need to be in a variety of threads and/or a certain age. I like the idea of making it like credit a system that included average age of comments and number of comments might work well, and later on you could develop an algorithm to discount accounts that went dormant and then start back up. A system like this will never be perfect, but increasing the barrier to entry would probably help a lot.

maybe giving un x amount of downvotes and upvotes per day as a function of the total ammount of comments upvotes? like if you have less than 100 upvotes you can downvote only 10 times a day? but if you have more than 300 your daily limit is 50. and can work with negatives, if you have less than -1 you cannot upvote or downvote anything. somthing like that?

I'd say keep the limit, but lower it to say 50, and make it a site wide rule to not have "upvote circle jerk" threads? This way it still encourages people to participate in their early days, makes it so enough people can downvote so that the thing you mentioned about corporations doesn't happen, and prevents brigading

Yea, unfortunately there is no perfect system. With the voteless image boards like 4 chan was, you have total democracy but you end up having to wade through endless drivel. With vote driven systems, you have endless vote pandering and good content often gets buried. I'm not sure the solution. Maybe the solution is to get off the internet. I may try that at some point.

This was one advantage voat had over reddit. Why remove it?

i was so exited that i couldn't stop myself to give the first downvote... :D

You are overlooking the obvious. Why not have a system of only downvotes? Everything starts as high as it will ever be, then the community decides how hard to trash it.

@Atko , I would consider putting in a notification system if someone down voats 10 or more posts, in the same day, in the same subvoat, that will then notify the user that they can block the subvoat.

It was a great idea, and like all great ideas it was abused, warped, and ruined.

while the new system seems more fair to me, i don't know it will change anything in the long run

to put in place a acquirement that a user must have x number of posts/comments before being allowed to vote will also change nothing in my opinion, only prolonging the inevitable

again, i would suggest dropping at least the down-vote capability entirely and just let users block other users

if you are aware of the fact that paid trolls can have a significant impact upon a posts ranking, then what sense does it make to keep the current system? these shills will be around long enough that any minimum time/post/comment limits will be circumvented while, at the same time, regular users are denied the ability to vote

why not let the individual user decide for themselves without affecting the experience of other users? seems to me this may be an effective way to curtail the effectiveness of paid trolls while protecting free speech and preventing group-think censorship through down-vote brigades

/my .02

Whoa, you can upvoat yourself now...

Downvoated because I can now! (thanks!)

Why couldn't the old system stay in place and also ban those kind of threads?

I like earning the ability to downvote and I don't know if it worked this way, but earning the ability to up vote more frequently too is nice.

I'm personally glad for the change. I've been here quite a while, and spend time here at least once a day but I guess I don't post enough to be worthy of downvoating yet. It actually discouraged me for a while from coming here as I felt like an outsider being allowed to stand in the window looking in at the community.

I personally envision all the people upset with this being the ones who can downvoat already and who all get together and fart into their wine glasses and sniff their sweet farts while feeling superior to all the lessers who are not allowed to fully participate.

To me stopping the downvoat brigades seems pretty easy. If a person has a high ratio of downvoats to very little up or even contributions, its safe to assume they are not an asset to the community and are only here to cause trouble. If a persons downvoat ratio gets too high, give them a warning and if they continue just ban the account removing all their past downvoats at the same time.

Correct, thanks, here's the code that is used for this.

I think you'd need to do something like create a 'proximity' value (based on threads/subs posted in) for every pair of users and have diminishing returns (or even a penalty) for voats in too close proximity.

I'm a little torn here @atko. I've been a member of Reddit for 3 years and in one month here I've gotten over 1k CCP. It's really not too difficult to gain the CCP necessary to downvote if you spend time actively being on the site. But the reason I say this is that it's given me a good perspective of some of the good and bad things about both Reddit's system and Voat's system.

One of the major benefits to Voat's system WAS this implementation. I talked about it to friends that you had to contribute to be able to vote on people's posts. That you had to be a part of the community before you were able to help shape it. As well, learning that other people could have a dissenting opinion and it didn't end your world was a great factor as you had to just pass over comments you disagreed upon rather than immediately being able to come in and downvote everything in site.

While you are worried about those few subverses that are bending the rules to their favor, recognize as well that rather than toss the system out let's tweak it!

Some Ways to Fix the system

Some of these are already on here, some might not be but my thoughts are to try to put them together to create a single idea thread.

• MINIMUM POSTS IN SUBVERSE TO UPVOTE OR DOWNVOTE

The idea here is that you need to contribute to be able to shape the forum. Lurkers should not be able to create a circlejerk, nor people who are visiting a subverse be able to destroy/nuke an opposing thought or subverse. I moderate the Colts subverse. If we had the subscriber levels of Reddit's user base, the Colts have 7k users and the Pats have 32k. Should the Pats be able to just come into the Colts subverse and destroy a person's CCP simply because of hatred? Having to interact with the subverse eliminates the idea that you can point out a thread that you don't like and have 100s of your 'followers' or fellow users go in their and brigade them.

• ALLOW SUBVERSES TO OPT-OUT OF DOWNVOTING

While not ideal to allow people to remove dissent, in some places it might be necessary. /v/protectandserve is a perfect example as the creators are wanting a 'safe place' for the officers to discuss things without wanting a giant debate. I'm sure that there are other places too, perhaps a subverse based upon encouragement of others or similar. Allowing subverses to opt out of downvoting/upvoting might help to eliminate some of those issues.

• SHIFT THE EMPHASIS FROM POINT-BASED TO TIME-BASED

Instead of a CCP based system, why not make it the same as you do for mod limitations? You have to have been a user for 5 days/10 days/30 days before you can upvote/downvote comments. This allows people to spend time getting to understand that you can read people's comments without needing to upvote or downvote.

• CREATE AN AGREE/DISAGREE BUTTON

I'm not sure what it would take, but so much of the issues with any upvote/downvote is that it is used as a disagree/agree button. Why not avoid this altogether by creating that button for those comments that are on point but simply not agreeable. Maybe this might help people to avoid the downvote button when in reality all they want to do is point out their disagreement?

Final Thoughts:

The big thing to me is removing the limitations also removes the learning experience that SOME received about how to be able to allow people to comment without resorting to using it as an agree/disagree button. It limited brigading and made it just a slight inconvenience to get to be able to help shape the places you visited. While some are abusing this, please take a breath before you jump ship on it. I really think it was one of the distinguishing features about Voat that attracted me and created the userbase that is much more civil in their discussions and created much more tangible content.

How are upvotes not just the inverse of this? They are the same thing, except one is down=disagree the other is up=agree. I don't get how the fact that it goes down is somehow different.

I think we should try it and see what happens. Whether it's a good idea or bad, we'll only find out if we try.

kudos to you to recognize a well intended but totally broken principle.

I got 100 CCP in like 1 day please bring back the restrictions to prevent voat manipulation at least until you actually ready to release a new system

It took me 5 weeks to get 68 ccp. My comments are generally not worthy. This is good news for the rest of Voat as you no longer have to endure my horrible comments.

About the Edit 2, this should just be reported as spam and dealt accordingly. I think it would be quite easy to spot these, but I also understand you guys don't necessarily have time for that.

I likes the restriction in some ways because I felt more inclined to contribute to discussions. At the same time I have been here for awhile and have not made it to 100ccp, and I'm wasn't about to post one of those give me points posts.

I got to a point where not downvoting by default was a nice watch.

You should completely get rid of downvotes and allow unlimited upvotes from the start. Downvotes are one of the main issues on reddit that creates echo chambers where people are reluctant to voice opinions that go against the herd .

The other main problem on this site is new submissions only appear in the new queue and often get ignored because no one sees them. This should be changed so they appear in both hot and new as they do on reddit. That's system works far better which makes it much easier for smaller subs to take off.

So now our system is just like reddits, just without the vote manipulation from Pao...

I don't like it.

I think the problem is:

• upvoat: I agree
• downvoat: spam / offtopic / useless comment

But the user interface make it so:

• downvoat: i disagree

I think the down arrow should be "i disagree", and you keep the "report" button to display different action to take for this specific comments (offtopic, spam, ...)

Here are my suggestions:

• Account must be at least 1-2 months old before being able to downvote.

I think a hard cap on time spent in Voat is a good thing. If you are serious and want to be part of the community you can wait a month or two before being allowed to downvote something. In the beginning it was a big deal because there weren't enough people to downvote spam but now we have plenty of people to help out with that and more active mods.

• Account must also have 100 CCP but the points can only be accumulated a maximum of 2 per day.

This is to stop people from making ghost accounts and then letting them incubate for the alloted time. This is to insure the accounts are active. If someone is active on multiple accounts then I guess more power to them but this makes it really hard to just make massive amount of accounts to use for downvote.

• 1 Downvote subtracts 10 (or some other number) of CCP points.

Basically if you down vote something it should cost you. So if you are going to down vote something you better have a good reason to do so.

I really liked not having down vote brigades. It was refreshing to see comments that normally wouldn't be at the top at the top.

Perhaps requiring new accounts to create 100 comments in 100 different subs before being able to vote 100 times?

Something like this, sure. Although this extend would end up setting the initial restrictions back onto me. But yes- I think that before you're able to voat, up or down, you should show yourself to be an active member of the community. Perhaps even a scaled approach. Contribute a baseline amount to a community through comments and you can start discussions/submit links. Contribute more and you can upvoat. Contribute more than that and you can downvoat. Yes- I think downvoating should be given at a higher participation level than upvoating.

EDIT

Upon re-read, I don't know if I made this clear, but I mean it on a per-community basis. Contributing to /v/politics doesn't necessarily make you a good contributor to /v/programming.

what if you need 100 ccp to downvote per sub?

like, I could have 300 ccp from /v/askvoat so I could downvoat there, but not in /v/gifs.

the same with upvoating but a smaller limit.

Sorry @Atko, I love this place, and I appreciate your hard work but I don't think this is a good change.

Upvoting does not intrinsically hide content.

It does. When only a tiny fraction of the user base looks past the first page(s) of links or comments, grabbing that space with upvotes is just as significant as displacing things downward with downvotes.

why did they do this? I liked the system before. If it's not broke don't fix it. Now all hypersensitive sissies from you know where are going to flood this place with bullshit.

To solve that we could make it so that you don't see replies to users you blocked, but yes, I agree, it needs some thought.

Good. Been on Voat for a while and still can't downvote. I come across so many threads that need downvoting, but I can't.

Now I can downvote without spamming subverses and gaming the system. The limit was stupid and I'm glad it is gone.

What's great here is that you ask us, the users and you guys are willing to listen for suggestions to make this place what users want, not what you have in your mind it should be. Thank you for doing that.

Maybe having it so that downvoting is connected to each individual subverse. So like in order to downvote in any subverse you have to earn X amount of upvotes in that subverse, which could then be changed by the owner of the subverse, that way big subverses that have a lot of activity might require 100 upvotes to be able to downvote, while smaller subverses might have say 10 or even none. This way as well moderators that care strongly about trying to prevent brigading then have a responsibility to go through and deal with any threads/comments that are "Please upvote!". You could even potentially have it so that the same thing is done with upvoting within the subverses to prevent people from making a bad or neutral comment and then brigading themselves up to be able to go elsewhere and downvote (or perhaps something based on time or number of posts within that subverse). Since anyone can create their own subverse, if moderators or such get too unreasonable with this the community can always make a new subverse that is far more reasonable.

I think the bigger problem is making a universal system, someone might be a pillar of society in say the news subverse, but then they walk into the gaming one and don't fit in at all, them being so important at the news subverse should not in any way carry over to the gaming subverse I think since they are different communities.

(calmly waits for eugenenix to stop throwing shit like a monkey)

You are fucking up a good thing

people are so fucking stupid. this is simple. just create an upvoat button and get rid of the downvoat button. it will help people focus on what they WANT instead of making them focus on what they don't want. complaining is always easier than doing something about it. an upvoat says you are shaping voat to become what you want it to become. a downvoat merely means that you're complaining about something that bothers you. but if that bothersome thing is removed, you STILL have nothing if you don't say what you actually WANT.

plus we all know the brigading has started with the downvoat button. we see it all the time on reddit. and we act like it won't happen on here. it's fucking idiocy. if you want to give people a downvoat button, make them EARN IT by contributing heavily to the site. and limit the amount of downvoats they get to ONE per day.

I like the 100 comment idea because then you'd at least have to put some time in. Not in 100 different subs though, that would require people to converse in subs they probably aren't interested in.

your not debating.

Yup, IP thing has been here for a while now and this hasn't changed today. I guess I'll just revert this change and restrict both the upvotes and the downvotes with a smarter solution later on. I need to talk with Justin, I'm really surprised that you guys are so afraid of new accounts downvoting you.

May I suggest a "total score" system?

Where when a post get 100 upvoat and 50 downvote, it will get 150 score.

More vote = more participate = hot topic

Yes I know how people who get used to reddit system don't like this idea.

The downvotes on this announcement are a good example for what people have already pointed out (downvote because disagree/dislike is an issue).

oh dear, youve regressed to yelling.

"Which is against reddiquette yet in practice it is the disagree button over there."

well, um, were not on reddit.

and as for the last third of your response, "Also: earlier you suggested it because I may have deserved getting downvoted, which was speculative insinuation. So there is that.", the fuck were you even trying to say or insinuate there. you, definitely deserve a downvote.

I earned my right to downvoat (100 CCP) the hard way. Since I got it, I don't downvoat at all. Should we move to a upvoat only system? Just saying. 0 means nothing and shouldn't that be enough? What do you think.

just ban those users who game the system to get ccp and scp. I guarantee srs, may the fempire burn in hell, will be brigading voat within the week.

Maybe you should only be allowed to downvote if you have made a specific number of comments within that sub. That way new users are motivated to contribute and learn about the community, and after a reasonable contribution earn the right to downvote. It also helps to prevent subs from warring with each other. Subs who cannot keep the begging posts under control risk being suspended for some length of time.

As someone who hadn't yet hit the 100 mark, I still thought it was a great idea to limit downvotes based on ccp. I didn't like the limit on upvoting though, it felt like I was being completely restricted from participating. A lot of the time I didn't have anything to say, but still agreed with someone's post.

Nah, older accounts would loose the ability to downvote but that's ok because many of these have "earned" their downvoting ability by working around the system.

Require new users to gain CCP from sub's that have more than 10k subscribers.

I don't like this change. People being able to create a new account and just downvote you is not going to help flourish this site.

Thanks, CCP for downvoting should come from more than one comment, absolutely. But we also need to restrict upvoting if we restrict downvoting though.

I have an idea for preventing Voat brigading, but I don't know how well it'll work to stop the disagreement button problem. How about if, instead of needing 100 CCP to downvoat, you need 100 CCP in that sub to downvoat. For example, to downvoat something in /v/gaming you'd need to have amassed 100 CCP through comments made in v/gaming. I'm sorry if this has been suggested. There are over 400 comments here already. I doubt this will even get seen.

If you're all ears, how the heck are you typing?

The biggest problem with the change you just made is that users can easily find a way around the IP restriction.

You have to couple this change with changes to the way posts are displayed. New posts on subs need to be much more visible by default (instead of just the HOT view) as do comments to posts. The front page should not solely be based on recent upvoats but made more intelligent by taking into account what we personally upvoat and displaying recent similar content based on keywords etc much like a Pandora radio station learns what we like over time.

De-emphasize the importance of imaginary internet points that other people assign to determine post visibility and promote better new content based on our own personal preferences and upvoats. Make voating more personal and not used as a weapon to promote peoples agendas.

your dodging the debate and leaping for the ad-hominen.

Making this change before having an alternative solution is a bad idea.

I think you should be required to comment on someone's comment before you can downvoat it. This helps prevent it from simply being a "butt-hurt" button, which it often is. This should at least mitigate brigading a bit. Disagree with someone? At least address the issue and get some skin in the game before downvoating.

Does the one vote per single IP address impact having my wife and I voating on the same computer, but different accounts?

Could you please instead leave the restrictions in place until the new system is ready, and have mods nuke "can has upvoats, plz?" threads?

What Irc is that, do you and other moderators have an IRC you all meet on? I'd sure like to see that IRC.

That's the problem you and other mods all collude together here to try and send out a message opposite to what the users want. It's obvious, you space rosa, 12 year toucan and the others always show up in force to drama thread trying to re-write the narrative. The funny thing is the votes don't lie the community sees through it. You guys wont be in power long here, of that I can assure you.

Why couldn't you just make it a site-wide rule that "upvote me!" threads weren't allowed? I feel like the CCP requirements were important to fostering discussion. Having to earn the right to downvoat really changed the way I use it. Also, I don't really understand what you mean by the IP address thing. What do you mean by "vote once?"

maybe those "dissenting voices" just, got down-voted because that's why the down-vote button exists. because they're shit voices, or racist, or shitposts, or a hundred other reasons because your not the master of how people vote, and theyre gonna do it on their own terms.

and "Is there a reason you worship the downvote? Lack the ability to debate?". now thats just personnal. you need to start debating.

No need to apologize. 200 comments spread out over default subs could be a good starting points for the ability to downvote. I'll discuss this with @puttitout.

I appreciate this move. For me, it was frustrating to keep seeing non-news in /v/news but not being able to do anything about it. Minor issue, I suppose, but I like that I can help sink non-quality content in my favorite subverses.

I like the idea of a comment quota before down voting is granted. It will take a bit more effort than doing into an upvoat thread.

You know she's not going to sleep with you, right?

Multiple subverses had "please upvote me" threads where their members were able to gain 300+ CCP in matter of hours. At the same time, regular users would need MONTHS to reach this level. Don't you see a problem with that?

I agree with everyone else.... The downvote restrictions was a nice feature because it forced new people to positively contribute to our discussions. This challenged trolls and only gave them the ability to post shitty, weird Troll posts (which were downvoated to oblivion).

It is not about the rules. It is about fostering conversation and the free flow of information. You don't own the conversation on your sub and, if you do think you do then I do not want to be there. You're a janitor, nothing more. If you want to be a moderator you probably should not be a moderator. A petty rule, enforced inconsistently and with an obvious bias, is a mark of tyranny. That has no businesses being on the main page - at all.

But spamming was always easy and downvote brigading started to show up just a few days ago after several organized groups worked around our system by creating "please upvote me" threads.

bowing to commercial pressure. so so sad.

I do care what users think, I just wish you guys offered alternative ideas instead of saying "this is a terrible idea". Perhaps forcing new accounts to create 100 comments before being able to Vote at all could be a better solution?

Preventing a blocked person from seeing your content would open up a lot of targeted abuse.

IP addresses are stored encrypted and we have no way to reverse this encryption

The programmer in me needs to nitpick a little. This isn't encryption, it's hashing.

This is probably the first big mistake that you have made so far.

Well I don't like it, but I know this place is evolving. I'm interested to see what the new system is.

What guys? Edit: I'm speaking about /v/adsonreddit for reference of shills

From what I've gleaned from the code in a few minutes of looking, it appears your last IP address used to login is not encrypted. I don't think I can find out from the code whether the web server logs contain IP or not.

I was so close!

Don't like. It was nice to earn the downvoat

Please note that you can only vote once from a single IP address

So people who go on voat at home and work will only be able to vote from one place? I think I prefer the old voting system.

To help the people that find this unpopular... They basically had to do it, after 'incorporation in the USA' they were always going to have to yeild to the NSA goons. This handily allows any sock puppet with multiple VPN to turn this site into the 'safe for limited discussion' place it should be. The sock puppet masters at the NSA (NeoCIA) and thier minions of semi retarded keyboard monkeys stand at the ready..

I have to say, I liked it better with the restrictions. It encouraged people to become members of the community. The only downside I saw with it was that people would start posting in threads and just saying like "I need CCP!!!", which was annoying.

@atko So maybe remove the front page concept entirely, and simply index sub verses accordingly, once a verse is selected maybe index the contents topically?

im sorry, part of an echo chamber is it hides content?...sounds like your vindictive because your content got hid.

I personally have no objection to trying this out. When I first started out, the voting limitations were brutal for new users. I am a little concerned about downvote brigaders but I say we should try it and see how it goes. Regardless, the 10 upvote per day restriction below 20 CCP HAD to go. It was very unreasonable

So, I just downvoated this idea, and I don't even have my 100 SCP yet. One of the things I like (uh, liked) about Voat was the notion of having to earn the privilege of wielding that down arrow. At the very least, would you please explain the rationale behind your decision.

Multiple subverses had "please upvote me" threads where their members were able to gain 300+ CCP in matter of hours. At the same time, regular users would need MONTHS to reach this level. Don't you see a problem with that?

Welcome to Voat, Inc., people!

You know what @flussence, if you want me to wear 200 pieces of flair, like your pretty boy there, @Endymion, why don't you just make the minimum 200 pieces of flair?

What's SCP and CCP?

This would also be a good idea. Make the circlejerk/circlevoat threads against site rules because it's voat manipulation.

I completely agree -- I, admittedly, was one of those that would downvote things I did not like (in addition to poor quality posts). Coming over to Voat and going a month without downvote capability trained me to just scroll past and ignore.

Just when I got enough upvotes to downvote, they cancel the rule.
Well fuck :)

voting IP addresses are stored encrypted and we have no way to reverse this encryption

That raises a question I've wanted to know: If I have an alt account, and follow the rules about voting etc, do you know what my other account is? For example if one account has personal info that could identify me IRL and the other account has porn, do you personally know that those are the same account? Or is all of that encrypted and only used for things like voting? Under what circumstances would the accounts be linked? I never felt comfortable with alt accounts on reddit because even if the reddit community didn't know which was which, the admins knew and I never trusted them.

Oh, so now this is the other site.

Just make is a slightly smaller limit. It cuts out alt account being used to manipulate vote patterns.

This is a bad change. Voting and submission privileges should be earned by demonstrating good behavior toward the community. This will make it too easy for spammers, brigaders, and other bad actors to pollute the site.

While I understand your thinking on this decision, I am left to wonder if you haven't so much leveled the playing field as enabled large groups to wield even greater power than they had before over the rest of Voat. Every new user they acquire makes them immediately stronger in their ability to affect post & comment scores site-wide. Also, we definitely need that block user functional for the likes of Amalek. In my opinion, it would have been better to make the latest change regarding CCP & SCP along with enabling user blocking at the same time. Having said that, now that Amalek has the power to downvote, perhaps utilizing all his accounts via VPN, I really have to wonder what he will do with all this new power. Nothing good, that much is certain.

Just my thoughts to consider or disregard as you see fit.

EDIT: Fixed a word

Bad idea, Atko. This enables downvote brigades, which SJWs consistently use for malicious means. The upvote and downvote restrictions were a solid line of defense against them. Please reconsider.

Just when I finally got therr :(

I agree, but people seem to be terrified of downvotes.

Need a good motivational song to keep going! Any recommendation? I can only think of Hearts on Fire video (Rocky montage).

Based Atko and de community outreach

I agree with removing the restriction on submitting content, but not removing the downvoat limitation. I think it's smart to only allow proven posters to downvoat, considering you get banned at 50 downs (unless that's been removed as well?)

No, cookies are stored in your browser.

Multiple subverses had "please upvote me" threads where their members were able to gain 300+ CCP in matter of hours. At the same time, regular users would need MONTHS to reach this level. Don't you see a problem with that?

Multiple subverses had "please upvote me" threads where their members were able to gain 300+ CCP in matter of hours. At the same time, regular users would need MONTHS to reach this level. Don't you see a problem with that?

thats, a downvotes function, yes. but, whose to say pure upvotes is less of an echochamber-potential?

Just because something is highly up later doesn't mean it is t violating the rules.

If it's not what the average user considers a stupid rule then it's entirely possible you won't cause a stir. Even more so if you don't have a mod deleting threads about themselves and their apparently selective application of the rules.

In /v/protectandserve we had a rule against police brutality discussion, yet people ONLY up payed police brutality discussions.

This is similar in concept to mods nuking [Meta] threads in subs that don't want meta discussions. Haven't seen one blow up yet, but I'm willing to be wrong. Do you have any examples?

If someone makes an IAMA that isn't an IAMA and it gets to the front page can I remove it? Or do I just let people violate the rules?

Short a brigade of a group shit posting some crap comment, I'm having a hard time finding a reasonable example of where a post that isn't an IAMA makes it to the front page and draws warranted backlash for being deleted.

From the average user, I can tell you that the cause of this is a combination of a poorly worded/executed rule (what is a "question '?' " anyway?) and a mod with shady past trying to take over a flagship sub. Make your rules clear, unambiguous, and evenly enforced and there should be no issues with blow back from deleting any posts that violate said rules. When you do piss people off for deleting something, and it's going to happen because people are idiots, then you can point to the clearcut rule it violated and your evenhanded application of the rules in the past.

no way to reverse this encryption.

How long does it take to iterate the lot? @Atko

If i accidentally tap a vote on my touchscreen, i can still change it, right?

We could remove downvotes altogether if that's what everyone wants :)

I still think your downvote should be limited per account for like, maybe a week or so when first making it? I think a timer system would be good at least

I don't like this at all. This is just going to open the floodgates for shills to manipulate content on Voat like they did on Reddit. I highly suggest reversing this decision.

Require a cookie to log in. Problem solved.

Oh please no. Please, no.

I see there's a healthy respect for downvotes as tools to hide off-topic comments going on here. _{This is obviously sarcasm.}

Well shit. It was nice while it lasted but I see where you're coming from.

What if I initially vote from my mobile phone, then go back to my computer, and can't vote. The single IP vote system doesn't work

I'm going to start using this line ALL the time now:

"Back in my day you had to earn your downvoat and comment privileges. Kids these days just have it too easy, no respect for what they have been given! We did that...... Hmph, we made it too easy for 'em is what we did."

That's true, as I mentioned vaguely. It's not hard to avoid it, but it's better than nothing, probably.

Multiple subverses had "please upvote me" threads where their members were able to gain 300+ CCP in matter of hours. At the same time, regular users would need MONTHS to reach this level.

CPP beggars ruined it, it seems.

Multiple subverses had "please upvote me" threads where their members were able to gain 300+ CCP in matter of hours. At the same time, regular users would need MONTHS to reach this level. Don't you see the problem?

but you took sides on the /v/AskVoat debacle without ever even doing an investigation.

Proof needed.

Many mods have been trying to get a hold of you about much needed features for a month now,

Proof needed

but yet you are wasting time on picking sides in a petty fight over something that broke the rules.

Firstly, there is nothing petty at about taking action on something that was clearly a concern of a significant portion of the community. Second, there is nothing petty about censorship, and this post

https://voat.co/v/AskVoat/comments/401467

Was clearly an attempt to quash a discussion that was critical of the mods. The grounds for deletion are complete horseshit, since the post doesn't actually break any of the stated rules unless you redefine every single word she tried to use.

/u/she is the only active mod in /v/AskVoat and her request to take full control over /v/AskVoat has been pending for almost a month despite her being qualified to take over and matching all requirements.

Not even @she said she was the only active mod. From the start of this entire thing, @shiny was also active. And you aren't going to be given a default sub when there is significant opposition from the community. This isn't reddit. People have a say in things here.

I'll be honest, in a couple of my subs I am afraid to enforce the rules out of fear you will side with the community instead of having a proper investigation. What you did was a knee-jerk reaction and I feel you owe /u/she an apology.

You don't run default subs, so the odds of your subs coming under that level of scrutiny are few and far between. Even if that were to happen, if you don't have asinine rules, people aren't likely to get annoyed in the first place. Knee-jerk? Apologize? Don't make me laugh.

Woah woah woah, why not just lower the restrictive CCP threshold?

God please no.
This stopped brigading and taught users that the downvote was an important item.
Removing this serves no purpose.

Why? @Atko

As a matter of fact, why does it have to exclude the sub at all? What advantage does limiting the CCP have over other posts?

Are subverse mods able to set restrictions in their individual subversives or is that completely gone?

Limiting accounts based on SCP / CCP totals makes me very reluctant to participate in this site. I have no interest in having my account limited because I may have an unpopular opinion. Those limits are directly opposed to free and open discussion. Even hiding posts that receive a lot of downvotes like Reddit does has a chilling effect on free discussion.

I kinda wish we had a disagree button, since that's a lot of what downvoats end up getting used for.

I hadn't reached the CCP yet and I'm not sure if this will be for the good or the bad

I really don't like this idea.

Requiring that people be active members of the site who contribute before they get to start throwing around down votes made a lot of sense in that it keeps people from just shitbombing anything they don't like. Blanket down vote capability only enables trolls of all kinds.

Aww man, I just got the ability to downvoat. I feel strangely let down.

I thought that users' IP address was used to stop one person upvoting something twice, or himself from another account?

Obviously that's not hard to get around, but still.

[...]in a couple of my subs I am afraid to enforce the rules out of fear you will side with the community[...]

And if you start deleting IAMAs with hundreds of comments/upvoats then it's a conversation that needs to be had.

a knee-jerk reaction and I feel you owe /u/she an apology.

No. It took me 15 minutes to see enough posting history to know that /u/Atko made a good call. Knowing what we all know about the other site, there's no way you can go through her posting and deletion history and honestly say that it doesn't throw up a bunch of red flags.

Bad idea.

What is the reason for this?

I am sorry to read this. Not saying there was no room for improvement, but earning some positive participation before being able to use the negative was a good idea. Lately there's been a lot of orchestrated news post. I am afraid those accounts with the ability to down vote will prevail even more.

You guys started a good thing. But similar to some other revolutions,people attempt to hijack or spread negative press on it.

Just very worried this will aid only them and not us.

I AM FINALLY AT 98 CCP HOW BLOODY DARE YOU.

EDIT: AND NOW IT'S 100, FUCK

I actually thought that word of mouth and actual sharing would be far more effective, since /v/all is basically most of the subverses crunched into one page, thus making it harder to find an individual sub.

Now that I can down vote, everyone have one except Atko. He gets an upvoat. Jk

I understand this move, Voat being largely based on freedom. Allowing people to downvoat right off the bat is more just. I suspect this will lead to a higher proportion of newcomers becoming lurkers, but alas, the move is fair and considerate of those less capable of "upvoat-worthy" contributions.

Allowing users to block users (for spamming or the like) will be an essential reaction to this change, I think. That and subverse freedom to opt out of downvoating, as has already been said, would make this a very liveable change.

I can see the value in this, but I share the common fear that brigading will become more common.

I can say it because her public actions stink. I don't need to know her to judge her actions.

Wow, this is a surprise. My initial reaction, I'm not sure whether this is a good idea or not. I would have been more in favour of lowering the limits to ascertain the effect it might have, rather than suddenly disable entirely.

Given the possible repercussions of this, could the admins maybe show some love in /v/reportspammers ?

Cheers :)

Edit: Just found this thread which I've found interesting to understand the thought process behind this move.

@Atko Can you explain why this change was made?

Why 100 CCP for taking over a sub? LINK SCP is more important if you want Voat to ever have good content.

https://voat.co/v/subverserequest/comments/365066

I'm not sure removing the initial barrier was such a great idea, but limiting the hidden cap on votes even after you got 100 CCP was long overdue. Votes = engagement, and running out makes you leave the site for the day.

This was probably the right decision, but still, I absolutely do not want the downvoat button to become something people use for disagreeing with someone. This should be sorely emphasized and there should be penalties for those who abuse it. I don't want brigading and "downvoting to hell" to be a thing on Voat. It was like that on Reddit and it made me not want to contribute.

Hey everyone, test your downvotes on me. FUCK GOOK NIGGER PISS WHORE

The modlog says it all, man.

Almost to 100 too :(

You are so far away from the actual facts of that situation it makes my brain hurt.

I thought Atko sent a fantastic message. If you apply weapons-grade stupidity to the moderation of a high profile default sub, expect to have the rug pulled out from under you. And rightly so.

Edit: for those who are making full use of their new disagree button ...

you took sides on the /v/AskVoat debacle

While I don't intent to speak on his behalf, I strongly suspect he removed it from default because the outcry from the community was shitting up the front page, signifying a failure of the moderation team.

without ever even doing an investigation

He hit the nail on the head and recognised exactly why the community was up in arms over the recent mod behavior. Something which I and many others already explained in simple terms to the mods yet they still feigned ignorance of the situation.

Many mods have been trying to get a hold of you about much needed features for a month now, you say you don't have time

Yeah maybe because running an operation like this with three (?) guys and no reliable income stream is quite demanding on your time.

/u/she is the only active mod in /v/AskVoat

No, there were 3 active mods at the time of the removal from default (@she @shiny @flux) and now there are 4. (+ @stoic) You clearly haven't even seen the modlog.

and her request to take full control over /v/AskVoat has been pending for almost a month despite her being qualified to take over and matching all requirements.

All the clues you need are here not least of which the -157 IKP.

The whole /v/AskVoat controversy could have been handled if /u/she's request was granted

The whole controversy (at least, the one surrounding removal from default) was because the current moderation team failed, resulting in a massive backlash from the vast majority of users.

I'll be honest, in a couple of my subs I am afraid to enforce the rules out of fear you will side with the community

That's up to you I guess, if you have nonsense rules and enforce them with malice, alterior motives or downright ignorance, then expect to be called out on it. Furthermore, if you're not engaging, and showing some sympathy with the concerns of the community in your subs, you're making exactly the same mistakes that led to the /v/AskVoat debacle.

Yes, I felt powerless when I first joined.

I just want to reiterate the purpose of downvotes is to allow users to control content. I would prefer using votes rather than giving all power to unreliable moderators. So if you disagree with someone, skip the downvote and actually comment! Keep an open mind, have a conversation, and we might all learn from each other. Keep downvotes to things you would want to censor. Why would you want to censor someone with an opinion different than yours, unless you are a total asshole?

I thought that the excess of downvoting was one of the worst things on Reddit, if not no.1 worst thing. Isn't that now going to become a problem here, too? However's it supposed to be used, on Reddit is just got used to try and disappear comments that people agreed with. What stops that happening with Voat?

That feature already exists.

Bad idea

I think they can, but then they are excluded from v/all

isnt encryption with no way to reverse it just essentially a hash/checksum.

Um...this is a terrible idea...