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:
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We need to start testing the functionality that is present to ensure we don’t have any gaps in functionality that we will need.
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We need to start a dialog to find all the weak links and scenarios that this feature will introduce.
Work Flow
- Create and Edit Votes (Votes are private until you "publish" it and can be found in your profile under Votes tab).
- Publish Vote (This creates a submission to the subverse and allows others to see it, comment, and vote on it)
- 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?
Broc_Lia ago
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.
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.