We're saying goodbye to global restrictions based on SCP and CCP (announcements)

submitted ago by Atko

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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KleanRider ago

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.

Atko ago

Thanks, but what about upvotes? Don't you think that this is a problem:

  • a large corporation which has hundreds or thousands of employees, comes over to Voat and pushes their advertising links to the frontpage at a fast rate
  • at the same time, majority of Voat users has no ability to downvote or has restricted downvotes

That's the problem I'm trying to tackle with this change. Any thoughts on that?

KleanRider ago

A few thoughts.

Problem only fixed by mods?

Hmm, to combat that organically (i.e. the normal user base) would be difficult. I feel anything organized to that level might not be controlled by an unorganized mass unless they are cued into it. Maybe at that point the moderators need to take action.

Attach Flags to Links?

One thing I know, as a normal user, if a link was flagged as "hail corporate" (or something like that) I would probably at least be aware that it is an advertising attempt. It wouldn't necessarily have to be down voted into oblivion but if that flag existed it would devalue any advertising attempt or at least attract enough normal users to take a look at it and downvote it. However I don't know how you would decide to have something flagged a certain way and who would do it but I thought I would just throw that flagging idea out just in case.

Upvote Rate?

Ah, now maybe a bit technical but if you could display the rate at which it was getting upvotes that might help people identify if a link is suspicious. Like if something got 1000 upvotes in 1 minute that would seem extreme. It might be an interesting experiment because certain news stories or events might have extremely fast upvote rates like the explosion in China. However something like a great new product would not have as fast an upvote rate as breaking news stories or a really really cute cat video haha. I wonder if such a statistic was attached to the left of the link, over time people would have a good "feel" for how fast certain things should make it to the front. Anything out of the ordinary could prove to be just enough for users to take a second and more cautionary look at the link. So like the Upvote arrow displayed "x upvotes/minute" and the down vote arrow displayed "y downvotes/minute".

I definitely appreciate the problem you have, I hope the ideas you get from this thread lead to a good solution.