SCP and CCP no longer play any role in your ability do submit links/start discussions or vote. You can now downvote as soon as you create an account. Please note that you can only vote once from a single IP address (voting IP addresses are stored encrypted and we have no way to reverse this encryption). We are still tweaking this so please report if you notice anything unusual about voting.
Edit: The biggest reason for this change is that I noticed how multiple subverses had "please upvote me" threads where their members were able to gain 300+ CCP in matter of minutes. At the same time, regular users would need weeks or even months to reach this level. That essentially broke the old system and we need something new. Perhaps requiring new accounts to create 100 comments in 100 different subs before being able to vote 100 times? If you have an idea, please feel free to share it, I'm all ears.
Edit 2: Here is an example of the problem I am trying to tackle:
- a large corporation which has hundreds or thousands of employees, comes over to Voat and pushes their advertising links to the frontpage because upvotes are not restricted for new accounts as much as downvotes
- at the same time, majority of Voat users today does not have the ability to downvote or has restricted downvotes
Edit 3: This is now reverted to the way it was. I need to think this through.
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sweetholymosiah ago
Why? Downvoting is the soft censorship the voaters need! Mods should have less power, and the users should vote as they please to control the content.
Vailx ago
No, downvoting is what YOU like. There are places where it's utter shit. Letting subverses opt out of downvotes is amazing and smart. Plenty of places have "downvote problems" where a few dedicated shits run around on sockpuppets and obliterate comms. Since the things are of niche interest (specific minor video game subreddits, etc.) these places end up totally crapped on, because the normal rate of upvoting doesn't cover the few metatrolls.
I think the ability to block downvotes in a subverse is a huge competitive advantage this place has over reddit. Some places have the mods as god emperors, and others have them as people pruning spam and crap, and the type of subverse determines which is appropriate.
sweetholymosiah ago
Actually I said we should avoid downvoting and actually have conversations. I think downvotes should be avoided, but if we are going to only allow upvotes, why don't we just have a "like" button and pretend we're on facebook?
Vailx ago
Because heaven forbid any parts of the sites turn off downvoting for any of the amazing reasons to turn off downvoting. That will obviously make the whole site into facebook. /s
sweetholymosiah ago
Down voating has a purpose. mods on the other hand...