Our fearless, alpine golfing owner and admin has requested community feedback about his proposed new infrastructure designed to empower users and make Voat more subject to votes. In his words:
I have always longed to empower the community content producers (submitters and commenters) rather than to centralize moderator power. It has always bothered me that a community can be hijacked by a single person or small group. It is my hope that this feature will make us all stakeholders and prevent some of the most obvious problems with platforms such as these.
I wish I had a nice thumbnail summary of the new capabilities, but I was not able to find one. It's still in the experimental stage. An earlier post on the subject from Putt is here: https://voat.co/v/voatdev/2358972
Please read his stickied v/voatdev post and share your comments on his thread. I highly recommend thorough perusal of the comments there so far, as this will be a huge change.
Additional discussion of potential manipulation by shills and other concerns can be found and contributed to here:
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darkknight111 ago
Proposal to silence shills: Increased posts per day penalties for users with very large negatives. -100= 5 comments a day, -150=3 a day, -200= 2 comments a day. -250 or more = 1 comment a day.
Proposal B to prevent gaming the system by shills (ie what Donkey did): Limit of 3 accounts per IP. All accounts in excess of that are DELETED. Accounts with bans from verses get counted first.
think- ago
I'm afraid this wouldn't stop hired/paid shills from posting.
And some board members use a VPN, so their IP address won't show.
darkknight111 ago
That's why you combo the two together.
For example, head shill Are_We_Sure due to his extreme low CCP would only be able to post one comment a day per account.
Since two of his accounts are already banned: Proposal B would kick in and delete all of his other alts but ONE, effectively limiting his ability to shill to only one post per day...PERIOD.
Due to his multiple bans, chief system gaming shill Donkey would for all points and purposes be shadow banned from v/pizzagate under this "combo system".
heygeorge ago
Save it for Rebbit.
As @think- said, mods on Voat have no ability to ban by IP. Such bans are easily circumvented. Due to VPN use, legit users could be easily caught up in the ban were it even possible.
darkknight111 ago
Rats.
Just trying to think of "outside the box" solutions in terms of "shill control".
The "infinite accounts per IP" situation is a legitimate problem. One that shills like Are_We_Sure actively exploit to work around comment per day penalties for low CCP and thus maximize their ability to shill and derail threads. Downvoating isn't very effective for this very reason.
The "Infinite Acounts" issue is something the mods should probably discuss with PuttItOut to see if any effective solutions can be devised.
think- ago
I'm still not sure how the problem regarding IP addresses could be handled - I think this was brought up when we recently discussed whether we should change the rules to be able to ban Donkey for good via his IP address.
I think either @kevdude or @heygeorge said that a ban via IP address wouldn't be possible, so we dropped this idea altogether in the end.
(Also, do you think those of us who already write many comments per day should be the ones entitled to torment the others with our rants even more, lol, while someone who isn't here daily should only have restricted assess? I'd like everyone to share his/her opinions, and don't want to restrict the amount of comments per day for newbies. On the contrary, they should be able to contribute as much as possible.)