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.

NeedleStack ago

It sounds nice but I don't see how this stops a malicious takeover of a sub.

Let's say a group coordinates an attack against /v/JustGrowIt. They conspire a long con to post and comment in that sub several times a day in order to eventually be the top contributors.

After they get a strong foothold in the sub they would then upvoat each others' posts and comments (which I think is the definition of brigading?) enough to twist the sub to fit their agenda and ruin the original spirit of the sub. That could and would indeed enable a mob to take over a sub.

Podd ago

This is exactly what I see happening.