Board owners are ultimately responsible for bad moderators. If the community cannot replace a moderator that was voted out with a moderator of it's own choice what good does it do to vote out a moderator? The board owner will probably just replace with the same type of moderator, or even worse keep the same moderator and change the name on the sideboard.

Is the community allowed to replace the moderator with one of it's own choosing? And what about the board owners? They should be able to be voted out too.

What protection will there be for subs that have previously been targeted by the group of shitposters here?

I just got a message from the voat statistics thinga majiggy, whatever its called, telling me that I am one of the top 50 commenters of voat. I get those fairly often. I am subscribed to nothing. I do not subscribe, I just comment. What is the use of using "subscription" as a voting parameter when it should be commenting and posting activity that carries the weight in a system such as just been devised? I bet there are a lot of people like me too that comment but do not subscribe. Using subscribers is terribly flawed.

no more canary eh, guess that's over now...

This is probably not needed and something you already know but Im going to say it anyway - because when you put out an idea that you've put time into it's easy (and reasonable) to be emotionally invested and fall into a sunk-cost fallacy or feel attacked by constructive criticism.

I'd rather have the following said and not needed, than the other way around:

We all* appreciate you

(a) working on and improving Voat

(b) involving us

so I just wanted to put a friendly reminder of that, and if you receive a lot of pushback (and I have the same concerns as mentioned by others) its because we care about this place you've created for us, and we know you're good enough to take the reaction for what it is, which is a love of what you've produced ^{yh, I know}, and that same desire to make/ keep it great.

_{*True for me, & I'm assuming the vast majority of others}

Feels like this is being done to directly benefit the SBBH crew...

Does it work on board owners too? v/pizzagate has been a hostage from day one. If the board owners get booted how do new owners get installed? Are they voted in at the same time?

i dont think this will bode well for voat since its human nature to troll the hell of each other.i can see malicious trolls trying to take advantage of this "feature"

anybody is free to post content on the subverses so i dont see the real point of this but to stir up the pot sort of speak

I'm an old fart who is not as computer savvy as some of you young bucks, but my first thought is, what's to prevent one user from creating and using multiple and/or throwaway accounts from flooding a post with downvotes?

Switch off the downvoting button. It's the only way to generate fair votes without downvote brigading. In case you are weak in basic logic, 0 (zero) becomes already negative if +1 ( plus one) exists, therefore -1 (minus one) is a logic fallacy and was created on Reddit only as censorship by downvote brigading unwanted posts.

Experimenting with direct democracy huh?

this punishes good behavior, (power lurkers who read and vote a lot but only contribute rarely when they have something good to add) and gives all the power to shills, spammers, and shit posters.

Hahahaha. Be careful - the cats will get you and take over! ;-)

@KatHarzso

I always wondered why we don't swap to an entirely decentralized (from subs) user based system. You submit a post and you can tag it with whatever you want - space, technology, whatever, midget porn and however many tags you want. Users default to viewing all tags. They can then change their preferred tags as they see fit. Add an ability subscribe to (higher priority listing) or block tags and you have a nice robust, decentralized system. Even better one auto-generated tag would be the user that submitted it meaning people could easily see content from users they find interesting, or block content from those whose content they find little value in.

Some really cool perks:

• Solves the 'Wow I found a cool article and I have no clue where to submit to to.' problem.

• Lets users find material they're interested in more easily. I like space related stuff. Turns out a space related topic only got submitted to /v/ObscureSpaceSub. That sucks. If instead the submitter could simply tag it space, obscure space thing, midget porn then I'd definitely be able to find it.

• No need for mods of any sort, which means no mod drama of any sort.

• Users could tag their content with a custom tag to create a community around that. For instance SBBH could simply tag their stuff SBBH.

I was confused by the name at first - I thought you meant I'd be able to let people see on my user page which things I'd up/downvoated. Could it be called, idk, Poals?

I strongly recommend not letting the outcome do anything that the poster couldn't have done unilaterally.

This sounds like a pain in the ass with alot of extra clicking around. Especially lame for phone voating.

I was wondering what the "Vote" section was for.

Mmmmh, much salt in this reply, tasty :)

Oh wait, shouldn't these be called Polls? When you were saying Votes, I was thinking the upvote/downvote on posts/comments, which was really fucking confusing

Posts shouldn't be hidden if they get downvotes. Censorship=failure.

@Puttitout giving more power to the shill brigaders! Nice! How about changing the typeface so you can't clone accounts by changing a lower case l into a capital I. lIlIlI

**Here's how to fix it: **

Allow people to give Mods "merits" for different permissions for each mod. The mod with the highest votes in each permissions area has priority over that area.

Call them "Voats" for better branding to start.

I think that time is not on our side, if we could have a limit on how many votes and submissions a person can do each day, that would be better since then everyone has a bigger chance of voting things back again. Even better idea(me thinks) is to allow moderators to have power, that happens only if a post has gotthen a big amount of votes in a short times, as in getting too many downvotes/upvotes(unrealistical voting amount at that given time).

Just some ideas I had, taken with a grain of salt(and all that).

#NOTMYNIGGERFAGGOT

I like the concept of give back the site to the user's but no matter what you do, as soon as you lay out the ground work the shills are going to start to work around. It is their job after all.

The problem I see here is shill mods censoring on subs like v/conspiracy. Reddit has the same problem. Censorship is the biggest problem facing our red pill distribution. Put a handle on that without fucking everyone else and your set. If not, sooner or later it will go downhill.

Thank you for the hard work.

I'm not sure I really understand this but anything that opens up my sub to takeover is not something I'm going to be keen on. It has good potential to happen too presumably. I'm basically at war with the anti-Semites around here - and there are a lot of them. If I end up getting voted out of ownership of my own sub I'm not going to be a happy camper.

I run a fairly small and unpopular subverse. I'm worried about getting kicked out, not because I'm a bad mod, but because the subverse is unpopular in the Voat community. I'm also worried that an attack against my sub my an SRS-like group would not be defended because the sub is unpopular.

Whether 'tis quicker to die by the sword
or cheaper to die by the vote

You would like this, Kevin.

What I'm worried about is the kind of political problem that Reddit, Wikipedia, and Home Owners Associations have in common. Those who are most power hungry spend the most effort to obtain power, which they then abuse. I hope there's some opportunity for feedback from the entire Voat community on any one issue, no matter how small the issue. I think this will help prevent abuse. So, for example, if Joe Cook spends all his time in /v/cooking he should still get a bit of a say, even if it's not as much, in a petition to demod someone in /v/knives

Just as we think of "how can we use this to make our community better", the jewish parasite thinks "how can I use this to subvert these people", It doesnt matter how well thought off, how well intentioned it may be...if it has a flaw of sorts, even if that takes decades to exploit (in the case of democracy). They will find it. The best thing that you could actually do is to make a jew filter. A crude machine learning thing that analyzes the writing style of its users, and if it detects too many jew used words, simply shadow bans them.

you had better give me a fucking badge, kid

To be honest I do not think that what you want to create can be done by artificial intelligence. What we want is what we almost have. Whenever we have issues with a power mod, you act as judge and the entire site comes together to acts as jury. There's no program sophisticated enough to understand all of our social nuances and individual personalities. How are you going toeork it it do some coding on Voat essentially replaces trial by jury?

My questions:

1. What stops a large group from going into a small sub of someone they do not like, posting a lot, upvoating their own posts, and then taking over?

2. The central mod power is removed from a sub, who retains control of moderating the CSS of a sub? Are there going to be battles over the CSS? Because there are plenty of people on here immature enough to be switching the CSS back and forth constantly.

May edit to add more later.

For those who want their subs to remain “owned” or private (and yes, I absolutely believe every sub owner should be able to choose), what if you opened much of this functionality up to the “Owners” so that they could select specific people themselves to act like a “Board of Directors”?

In essence, instead of having ultimate control via assigning people as moderators to their subs, they could hand pick the best members of their subs and assign them voting rights, allowing them to vote on every type of subverse issue (excluding Owner's removal). Collectively, these people could have the power of a Moderator, but use voting to determine outcomes of content removal, banning users, etc.

This could allow the Owner to keep complete control, while also allowing the ability to step away when needed (life is busy) and have the sub continue on, healthily looked after by their chosen voters. If he saw people in his hand-chosen group making poor choices they could simply remove their voting privileges and shuffle/add to the voting group. Maybe the voters THEMSELVES could even have the right to remove voting members through votes? Could there be a massive checklist of options given when assigning rights to members, deciding which actions they will be allowed to request? So some could be hugely autonomous and self-run, while others are tightly controlled, all by the Owners discretion?

As to the possibility of an Owner abandoning a sub, maybe if a subverse owner hasn't been logged on in 6 months (just a filler number), it would automatically open the ability to create a vote to assign a new owner to the sub? So the "Board of Directors" could choose a new owner, who would be given full Owner rights and the previous Owner kicked into the "Board of Directors".

TLDR: Let sub owners assign voting rights and rules to hand-chosen users, which in one example, could look like having a board of directors who vote together on decisions for the sub. The owner retains full powers to add/remove these people as they see fit. No cap on how many. Eventually it could become a majority of contributing users, at owner’s discretion.

EDIT: The point of this is to say that we could use this functionality to allow for different forms of governance per each Owner's desire. Some democracies, some republics, some dictatorships. Freedom to choose =)

I have 1 complaint that I don't believe was raised here yet.

Votes seem to have some sort of limit regarding participation, but then there are subverses that actively limit participation ( e.g. everything by u/Henrycorp ). A year and a half ago, he took over the subverse v/gunsarecool, locked it down to shut out the community, and completely reversed the message of the subverse, prompting everyone to start using v/gunsarereallycool.

At this point, sure, there's not much to do about that particular case any more. But, it's easy enough to see that people who do manage to become owners of a subverse can just try to lock out the existing community and hope that they take too long to organize before the system starts seeing the legitimate subverse users as people who "aren't contributing", permanently preventing them from being able to undo the damage.

With that in mind, I believe that outcome votes of a serious nature ( ownership requests, ownership replacements ) absolutely still need to be reviewed by the site administrators or general users, if only to ensure that no funny business is going on, and be allowed to overrule an outcome if it's obvious that someone was trying to game the system.

Furthermore, I would say that ongoing votes for any subverses subscribed to should be stickied at the top of the front page, in order to get the attention of the users who don't go to specific subverses for content.

Interesting. Will this finally prove put is an srs faggot.

You dog food it. Put it on /v/voatdev before anywhere else. Ok, a few test subverses here and there. But something you can be positively/negatively impacted by. And why not /v/announements? Since you're so passionate about forcing democracy on everyone.

This changed my perspective a bit.

I can't see this being mandatory for small subs. I see this as a management feature for system subs in the future.

A subverse classification system will be shipping along side of this and only subs under certain classifications will allow these referendums to be created.

Your deployment suggestion is wise. Thanks.

I like voat the way it is. My personal vote would be to keep things the way they are.

I also think your idea has a lot of potential. A limited implementation to the system subs could do great things for the site. If things go wrong, you can always revert, or intervene in another way.

I really believe the only way to succeed at managing a community like this is to be a sort of hands-off, benevolent dictator. A role you have filled well. Sometimes you have to step in to address issues of vote manipulation or coordinated attacks, but mostly you leave it to the community to sort itself out. And I like that. The borderline-anarchy here is a big part of what appeals to me, much like the chan forums. For me personally, I can deal with some shills that raid subs and try to get mods kicked out. Its just part of the experience.

Regardless of you decision, I can appreciate the the amount of work you've poured into this site. Rock on brotha.

Get rid of the down vote. There's my 2c

Funny how all the hangups on this idea hinge on a huge elephant in the room.

Let's just keep ignoring it. I'm sure it'll get better 😩

I like this, keep it in a controlled area. So many people have good points about potential issues, ways of fixing them (which bring up other issues..)

The best thing to do, would be to roll it out and test it first. Hash out the final product. Only thing is, I wouldn't start with just voatdev. Start with v/whatever, so we can see how it does against the bots/shill/alts and just more general users.

@kevdude

I bet you're happy- This is similar to what you've been talking about for a pretty long while. Looks pretty cool.

This looks well thought out. It's pretty exciting, very original.

If it doesn't go well, if the votes are manipulated or something; we can back out easily?

I vote neutral.

I can agree with this, if a mod created a subverse and is active on Voat they should be allowed to keep it and serve as benevolent dictator.

I think you linked to the wrong user, if you meant the voater who licks kike-buttholes aggressively on an almost daily basis it's @Henrycorp

plz get rid of the pedo verbs i know its free speech but i am getting tired of downvoating them every day but they still get get positive up votes they onle make vote look bad

Ghey.

what?

It seems like the brigaders will just use this to use new accounts to take over a sub, then slowly change the modding over time. Now all the subs that are safe with benevolent but little less active mods can be replaced by Sanegoat's alts.

I like my beer like I like my society: Free.

Love what your doing with the place. IJS

your lies will not last, twit

go suck more cock faggot

We figured out who most of you are

lol okay genius you starting to(the finger points that someone im not) sane now,,,, I really dont spend any time on this site, ive moved to minds because of control fucks like you

Voat is the best and I trust you Puttitout, but if it starts to suck we will just go somewhere else.

who do you think you are talking to? lol

huh? what fantasy land you live in.... wtf are even taking about

Even then I'm not sure he should: If he can be kicked out of /v/gunsarecool then anyone can be kicked out of any sub by anyone with enough alts. Migrating to /v/gunsarereallycool is more effective. The usefulness of hijacking a sub ends if people can migrate to another one with a secure mod team protecting it.

and honestly, grassy plus this one is the only one..... because muh free speech!

if it turns out this sucks dick and makes voat worse will you revert the changes?

Ok, having reviewed the feature I honestly think it's way too abusable in it's current form. For example, what's to prevent SRS from doing this and voting on it with all their alts/purchased accounts?

I can already see a couple of ways to attack subs with this. For example you could create an outcome poll, downvote it into oblivion so no regular user notices it, then link to it in your brigade chat so all your buddies can vote you in as the new mod team.

If the polls are stickied to prevent submarine polling, then a hundred alts can make the sub unusable by filling it up with polls.

Even if only one poll is allowed at a time, that's basicly an invitation for sanegoat/SRS/amalek/manhood101 to sticky their rants in every sub. Plus no one gets to actually use the feature because the spot is always taken.

How this works: Votes with an outcome (mod removal for example) will have a restriction placed on it so that only contributors to that subverse can place votes. Just for simple purposes we can say that in order for a user to vote they would have to have say X comments in that subverse in the last Y day .

Is an ineffective limit. It's extremely easy for them to spam innocuous sounding comments around the place to qualify as a "contributor." They do it anyway to farm Karma. I don't think there's any way contributor status can be effectively tested for.

In addition, only certain subs will have these outcome votes allowed in them. I was thinking that once a sub gets to a certain size (posts per day, subscribers, etc) it then turns "public" and allows outcome votes.

That still has all the same problems. Someone can spend years building up a sub only to be replaced overnight by powermods.

I appreciate you've put a lot of work into this, the effort is obvious, but democracy is a false god and it won't make voat better or stronger. Polling is useful, but outcome votes should be restricted to the mod team. Non-outcome votes are fine for regular users as a fun feature, or for making their voice heard.

honestly Kevdude, fuck off, Im sick of your lap dog argument and you can go fuck yourself.

Christmas Bonus:

We have designed and will soon be developing a new feature that will provide a brigade proof way for a community to decide on who moderates the subverse. Let’s just call it “Moderator Polling.” Hopefully late 1st quarter 2016. Stay tuned.

https://voat.co/v/announcements/729257

Seconded.

Yeah, that will work fine at first but that's why I said dedicated group.

SRS didn't come out of nowhere to gain control of reddit. It took 'em like 5 years.

We will also more than likely have a "template" for certain types of votes. So a mod removal vote would automatically enforce some sort of appropriate restriction upon creation.

Douse the cross with kerosene, toss the match and get it lit for the festivities.

My main concern is "big fish eats little fish"

There are subreddits that are bigger than our entire site. A dedicated group could drive the site into chaos.

Also, it'll boil down to popularity contests a lot of the time.

You're free to leave this site if you don't like the person running it.

I knew it!

I'm onto you now... I'm watching you...

Will Votes have a time delay for how often they can be activated in a subverse?

Will there be a limit on how many Votes an account can initiate?

Will there be a way to differentiate between casual votes (CSS change) and serious Votes (mod removal).

I don't want the usual crew spamming subverses with request for mod removals and rule changes but there needs to be room for less serious things to be changed as much a subverse participants would enjoy.

Can you keep your drama in another subverse?

I am aware of what happened. I have not researched enough to come to a conclusion of guilt towards either party.

Users/Groups often drive out descent mods with these tactics and then Voat is left with an empty bag, so I fucking hate it. It's a no win outcome imo.

Just to throw my two cents in here, I think this is a great change that needs to be done. Essentially you are allowing the community to moderate itself. The only people I can imagine who would be against that are the ignorant or those with malicious intent.

Thank you for working so hard to make this site great!

Interesting @PuttitOut!

I have a suggestion to explore. When creating the restrictions (ie subscriber for more than 1 year), could we see results of new restriction before publishing? Ie, sub X has 5000 subscribers. I apply the restriction subscriber longer then 1 year, then see only 10 subscribers can participate, possibly even see who those 10 subscribers are. Either show dynamically on the fly or after saving the vote.

Make sense?

Thanks for your work here man!

Can users with multiple accounts, ie ShareBlue employees, also manipulate this voting system? or do same connections using multiple accounts get just 1 vote?

You mis-spelled Voat (call them voates not votes) :)

wow... you are killing voat

who is paying paying voat?

An abstract idea that I don't think people should do but I'm going to write anyway.

What if all new subverses had a main name that was rather long and random. Think of it as an address. And then subverses had aliases that could be shorter. There would be a democratic or market process for who gets to occupy the alias.

Lets say that people could donate money and that amount would always be attributed to their account. The could commit their sway to a vote and thereby influence which subverse has access to an alias. They can always rescind their vote and apply it to another issue.

It's basically an idea I had about DNS but applied to subverses. Imagine if everyone was pissed off at google enough that they could just replace google for a day. Imagine if whoever first nabbed freespeechforum.com was a dick and just put a parking page on it but the community wanted to use that name for something useful. Imagine if someone built a useful tool with a relevent name but then abandoned development while others created better tools which started with shitty names and people wanted the good tools with shitty names to have a better name, and they guy was nowhere to be found. Basically it allows the community to decide what to call things. Nobody is gyped out of a "purchase" because they retain influence.

I really have little faith at this point.

I guess I don't know enough about this whole idea to really comment intelligently, but I do have some concerns. I pretty much like Voat the way it is, otherwise I wouldn't have spent as much time here posting, so as with anything, change can be scary. My biggest concern is that I am in the vast majority here ... those who follow the Voat philosophy and have almost never banned or censored someone from any subs I mod. I've also spent a lot of time building up subs that I enjoy. So my concern is that it now sounds like in the interest of appeasing a few for the misdeeds of a tiny minority of mods like HenryCorp, I could be voted out of one of my own subs by a group which bands together for no other purpose but to take over a sub. Maybe I'm just reading more into this than there is ... but I don't get the point.

It has always bothered me that a community can be hijacked by a single person or small group.

Any evidence of this?

When the Vote is "closed" the system will execute it

i.e. execute the badly behaving mod

Who is going to be able to set up the Votes? Any user? Or just moderators?

Who is paying for Voats server?

Are we doing to allow censorship of @system subverses?

Will /v/whatever remain unrestricted?

If Voat will become more moderated, will it be possible to move posts to /v/whatever rather than removing them?