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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Le_Squish ago

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.

PuttItOut ago

First let's distinsquish between the Vote types: We have regular votes/polls (Votes with no outcomes) and Outcome Votes (votes that have a mod, rule, etc. change associated with them). In code these are called outcomes so I've started calling them Outcome Votes (someone rename these please).

I wanted to design Votes so the community can use them for polling all the way to serious issues like ousting a bad mod.

Outcome votes will have to be limited. I won't allow 100 outcome votes to be active in a sub, that's ridiculous.

My original thought was to allow a user to create 1 vote every 30 days and allow mods a few more.

Open to all ideas but this has to be figured out.

go1dfish ago

So to borrow terms from blockchain governance projects:

Signaling Votes are votes to express a preference. Another term that could work is Opinion Poll.

For Outcome Votes, I would call them "Binding Votes" since the outcome is binding on the community.

I'm very worried about where it sounds like this whole thing is going, Binding votes on rules to enable removals will eventually lead to the same failures as reddit if they are allowed everywhere.

Voting in an aggregator as a way to sort aggregated preferences is one of the key beneficial features, but to give people voting power to dictate social norms via moderator power is a very different game. It gives the collective power over the individual the power to restrict. Up/down voating on content allows users to sort things by a popularity vote but it does not inherently restrict what people are able to say.

I fear that voting on enforceable rules will limit what people are allowed to say.

This is not in itself terrible, so long as Voat maintains clear public spaces that are moderated in an incredibly hands off manner.

v/whatever staying as unrestricted as site wide rules allow may be enough to provide this public space, but my preference would be to retain it across all broad topical subs that system currently moderates.