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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Broc_Lia ago

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.

go1dfish ago

Brigades are a red herring here IMO, the problem is the very idea of giving a mob control of what is allowed to be said.

You can put restrictions on the mob all day, but in the end it gives the many power over the few.

There must remain significant spaces of the site that are immune to this sort of control entirely or it will inevitably devolve into another heavily moderated censor fest, even if that censorship is aligned towards a different purpose.

Nerobot ago

Brigades are a red herring here IMO

They most definitely are not.

go1dfish ago

People are misunderstanding my meaning here. I'm not saying brigades aren't an issue.

I'm saying that even if you solve for "brigades" the real problem with this system is the idea of giving users the authority to censor others to begin with.

Nerobot ago

I'm disagreeing with you that brigades aren't the bigger problem while not dismissing that what you say is a problem as well. Thee immediate threat is from shitposters here who will try to take over peoples subs and then retaliations will happen.

I also agree with you. You already have people wanting to vote in rules on v/whatever and system subs. The only rules there should be that spam and the site rules are followed.

Broc_Lia ago

Brigades are a red herring here IMO, the problem is the very idea of giving a mob control of what is allowed to be said.

I think they're a genuine threat, but that's also a concern.

PuttItOut ago

The vote creation page currently offers FULL ACCESS for creating any type of vote you want, including unlimited combinations of outcomes, options, and restrictions. What you see is unfettered access.

We will not be allowing full access to Votes like this after testing. More than likely Admins will manually create referendums (Votes with an outcome like removing a mod) and then later the website will have an enforced template that provides structure necessary for a fair vote.

Everything you say is valid though if we were to expose the functionality as is.

weezkitty ago

Full access or not, brigading is a serious issue

Broc_Lia ago

Thanks for replying.

More than likely Admins will manually create referendums (Votes with an outcome like removing a mod) and then later the website will have an enforced template that provides structure necessary for a fair vote.

I'm trying my best and I honestly can't think of a way to make votes fair in a way that a brigade can't work their way around. The only things you can automatically test for are easy enough to fake (CCP, SCP, activity, account age etc.). You could do it manually by creating an "elector" mod tier with the power to vote in referenda, but if mods can pick the electors, then that removes a major proposed function of this system which is to impeach abusive mods.

Something you could add which would make them more difficult to fake, would be to add a quorum. It's easy enough to get 100 alts to vote for you, but probably a bit harder to make so many alts that they account for (say) 51% of the sub membership.

PuttItOut ago

So far all my attention has been put into the infrastructure and back end pipeline to enable this. We can build in unlimited types of restriction analysis as well as combine and group various ones. We have the foundation to build out as much complexity as need be.

Please don't assume the few options we have on the preview site is finalized.

But you are correct, we can't produce a bullet proof system that can't be gamed, but we can make it extremely expensive to game it, which increases the confidence in our system.

Broc_Lia ago

Even if it's only slightly gameable though, that still makes it worse than the current system which is near non-gameable. Mods are a good last line of defence for non-system subs. And migration is an effective method for dealing with badmins. It even used to work over on reddit back when the admins were neutral and pro-free-speech. That's how subs like /r/trees and /r/ainbow got started.

Liber ago

You’re correct, and this change will be the end of migration to save Voat ideas.