Alpha Preview: Voat Votes (voatdev)

submitted ago by PuttItOut

I am going to start getting community feedback regarding the new Vote infrastructure we have been working on. When we release this feature, it will be a huge change for Voat, one I think will truly make Voat a community. 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.

This feature will introduce a ton of “what if” scenarios and we need to start thinking about the details in order that we introduce a solid feature.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way we need to accomplish two things:

  1. We need to start testing the functionality that is present to ensure we don’t have any gaps in functionality that we will need.

  2. We need to start a dialog to find all the weak links and scenarios that this feature will introduce.

Work Flow

  1. Create and Edit Votes (Votes are private until you "publish" it and can be found in your profile under Votes tab).
  2. Publish Vote (This creates a submission to the subverse and allows others to see it, comment, and vote on it)
  3. When the Vote is "closed" the system will execute it, meaning the outcomes will be executed (Not implemented yet)

Create a new Vote:

In Subverse sidebar click "Create Vote"

https://preview.voat.co/v/whatever/vote/create

Find your Votes:

Click your profile name > then click Votes

To see Votes in a sub:

In Subverse sidebar click "View Votes"

https://preview.voat.co/v/whatever/votes

I will be answering questions in this post so if you have a question just comment and I'll get back to you.

Thanks Voat.

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RightHandOfTheGoat ago

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!

Broc_Lia ago

It's a really really bad idea and I hope he reconsiders it. Democracy will make the site extremely vulnerable to brigading.

RightHandOfTheGoat ago

Please explain. All of our content is already democratically curated. How would this make Voat vulnerable?

go1dfish ago

Present voting affects sorts. We vote on how well posted content is received by the community, not in what is allowed at all.

Voting on rules to be enforced by moderators allows the majority to restrict what is allowed to be said at all.

The current voting gives us very little power over each other, but this new system seems designed to legitimize the practice of top down curation by voting for the curators and rules.

It’s not bad in itself, but if it is allowed to take over the whole or majority of the site it could very well lead to many of the same issues that plague Reddit.

Broc_Lia ago

All of our content is already democratically curated

That's not quite true, it heavily relies on mods to keep spammers down. I'm not sure if you were around for the manhood101 spam, but I for one definitely deleted a few hundred comments of theirs.

How would this make Voat vulnerable?

Hostile takeovers of subs. As things currently stand each sub is a fortress: So long as the mod team remain active, there's nothing any brigade group can do to attack it. If you allow democracy every sub will be vunerable and brigade groups will be able to take over pretty much any sub they like and vandalise it.

PuttItOut ago

Yeah, few will ever go over and play with this code to get familiar with what it will offer, let alone read more than 50% of this post, so many will not have an accurate perception of this change.

I believe 100% in this direction and started designing it over 2 years ago.

Owlchemy ago

That's it! I was planning on reading 62% of this post, but now I know I'm only obligated to read 50%. What was I thinking?

I do like all the free publicity I've gotten for v/gunsreallyarecool so far though ... and didn't even initiate it. Now if someone needs a drink after finishing their 50% drop by v/PaddysPub.

weezkitty ago

I believe 100% in this direction and started designing it over 2 years ago.

Maybe you do, but the community may not. Isn't that what really matters here?

Don't be so confident in an idea just because it's your idea. Not singling you out...that really goes for everyone