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:

Alpha preview: Voat Votes

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:

A running list of concerns people have with the upcoming Votes feature