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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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.

Disappointed ago

I would like to see sub creators able to opt out of this. There are people right now building up comment points in subs they never used to participate in. This is just the clever ones that have gotten in early, mind. Some of these people are able to create multiple accounts on TOR and Vpn and are doing so. Bigger subs might be ok for a while but smaller subs will be immediately attacked.

@Xennios @DancingQueen read this submission.

Disappointed ago

@Dancing_Queen pinged your old username. Read the submission.

Dancing_Queen ago

This seems like a huge problem especially since I’m locked out of my old account and have this new one.

A popularity contest to take over a sub is a terrible idea. We would lose a free speech zone we’ve had since the reddit days and actually got banned there for allowing any type of post even if it’s unpopular.

We’d be brigaded within days and the sub as we know it would cease to exist. What’s the point of creating and curating a community if it can be taken over by the top poster or someone with the most votes? What would stop those new mods from banning the people they disagree with or for holding a unpopular opinion.

Xennios ago

Maybe that's the point. I don't why else a system this inherently flawed would be implemented.

Dancing_Queen ago

Reddit or reset/gaf?

Xennios ago

Reddit

Dancing_Queen ago

They’re all so cucked I couldn’t figure it out lol.