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Owlchemy ago

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.

PuttItOut ago

Ok Owlchemy, let me try to take on a few points:

So my concern is ... 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.

This is an issue I have given a lot of time thinking about. Part of sites like Voat is that a user can create their own unique eco-systems and I do not plan on abandoning this.

I do not want malicious take over of a sub by people that don't contribute to it.

So I've designed most of the infrastructure to give the "content producers" the power and to strip it from those who don't contribute. So if it is done right, a group of people who do not contribute to a sub will not be able to take it over. If you don't have skin in the game you have no power.

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 days.

All these details are yet to be hammered out but I wanted to make sure you know that I am not enabling a mob here, I'm giving producers their voice back.

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.

Owlchemy ago

Okay, that makes more sense. I do still have a bit of a concern dealing with subscriber numbers though. That being that I'm pretty certain, but can't prove this, that the number of subscribers in any given sub, especially those which are the most popular are highly inflated. My thought is that so many folks have come and gone from Voat over time, all the totals are way off. People come in, subscribe to a bunch of subs that interest them and then disappear. Maybe they come back, some may even occasionally lurk, but many more are just gone. So anything based on number of subscribers should be based on a good estimation of how many there really are ... not what the counter reflects. I'm not sure that's even doable though. My guess is it would be difficult, if not impossible, to ever know if a subscriber number is accurate. Otherwise, I have a wait and see attitude to the 'democracy' thing. Thanks for the input ... it does help ease a bit of my concern.

PuttItOut ago

People come in, subscribe to a bunch of subs that interest them and then disappear

This is exactly what has happened over time. But those numbers ARE accurate because when spez said we lied about them I ran an update statement to ensure they were accurate and then WENT UP a few percent. True story.

As this code matures we will fine tune it.

CujoQuarrel ago

How about people like me who don't subscribe to any subs and use /all and /new for reading?

Ina_Pickle ago

I subscribe to everything, and then still use all for reading.

Owlchemy ago

Cool, thanks! It'll all come together. Thanks for all the hard work.