Now that I have your attention, I have a confession to make: I lied.
Well sort of… because Voat 2.0 doesn’t exist yet, but it will in the future, and this thread is the first in a series of Quarterly Reviews we will be doing to get your feedback on what we need, what we need to improve, and the direction we need to move as a company and as a community.
I can finally announce that Voat’s features (software-wise) are now in the ballpark of a semi-functional platform. I’m not saying Voat is perfect, nor am I saying the features are mature, rather I am saying that we are nearing "acceptable" as a basic functioning platform.
But a basic functioning platform was never our end goal, it was just the first milestone we needed to hit. Now that we are approaching this milestone we need to lay out our future direction.
Voat doesn’t want to be a “clone” any longer. We want to stand up and proclaim our uniqueness. We want to put our differences on display and stake our future on them. Voat can’t survive without redefining ourselves, without evolving into something bigger, something better, something unique and new.
This is the post where we get to dream big, have no boundaries, no constraints, and live in w
Hypothetical
You have an army of programmers, mountains of cash to burn, and you are the only board member: What does Voat 2.0 look like?
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rwb ago
Proper search function. I can't even find one now, but when there was one, a particular term could be searched, and none of the results would contain the term in the thread title, which is baffling. A good full featured search function is at the heart and soul of any digital information base.
Expandable trees with one click for specific dialogues in a given thread. It is disconcerting to try to follow any particular dialogue and have to continually open hidden comment after hidden comment. I had an interesting conversation about this feature with you here Vindicator: https://voat.co/v/pizzagatemods/1691739 ...which sums up my thinking on how posts are displayed. You suggested I should submit something to v/VOAT/dev, and I intended to, but this might be a better place yet.
Simplification of submission requirements. It is reasonable for VOAT to set certain criteria for posting, and of course no system is going to be perfect or satisfy everyone, but there does seem to be some redundancy and confusing aspects to the requirements as they currently exist. They could be shortened and clarified.
Better comment history search function. If one wants to learn something about a particular users comment history (which is vital for trying to form a better picture of someone's position on issues overall) one must laboriously slog through page after page, which must load one at a time, to get to their earliest posts. I would like to be able to access someone's early, middle, or late posts with ease. There seems to be several ways to increase efficiency in accessing post history, and any of them would be better than what exists now. The one that perhaps jumps out at me would be having post history page numbers, so if a given user has 9 pages of old posts, one could skip from the first page to say page 8 or 9 just by selecting it.
View count on title summary. Thread up or down votes give some indication of the interest in or merit of a given thread, but it can be misleading on occasion for several reasons. A view count is available, but one must click into the thread in order to see it. It would be beneficial for the reader to also know how many views a given thread has before clicking on it.
And last but not least, a complete ban of the word shill.
Vindicator ago
Repost your suggestions to the link provided in the post. No one will see them here. Was trying to send people over there. :-/
rwb ago
Hi Vindicator, I eventually realized your desire to have it posted in the other thread, and did so shortly after, but neglected to add a note here regarding same. Curiously, it posted under a number instead of under my username. Can you tell me why? I trust there's some VOAT reason, but it's not obvious.
Vindicator ago
Yes. They anonymized that thread - I guess so people would feel free to be totally honest. Like on 4chan.
throwaway89209834 ago
It is so damn easy to register a google API for a embedded google search, my 12 year old nephew knows how to do it. They even give you the code snippet to paste into your website to have it show up and the search is isolated to whatever site/subverse to want. This is like decade old stuff, there is no reason to not have it. Shame on Voat...