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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fusir ago

An abstract idea that I don't think people should do but I'm going to write anyway.

What if all new subverses had a main name that was rather long and random. Think of it as an address. And then subverses had aliases that could be shorter. There would be a democratic or market process for who gets to occupy the alias.

Lets say that people could donate money and that amount would always be attributed to their account. The could commit their sway to a vote and thereby influence which subverse has access to an alias. They can always rescind their vote and apply it to another issue.

It's basically an idea I had about DNS but applied to subverses. Imagine if everyone was pissed off at google enough that they could just replace google for a day. Imagine if whoever first nabbed freespeechforum.com was a dick and just put a parking page on it but the community wanted to use that name for something useful. Imagine if someone built a useful tool with a relevent name but then abandoned development while others created better tools which started with shitty names and people wanted the good tools with shitty names to have a better name, and they guy was nowhere to be found. Basically it allows the community to decide what to call things. Nobody is gyped out of a "purchase" because they retain influence.

PuttItOut ago

I love radical ideas like this. The concept of subverse names being loosely coupled is interesting, very interesting.

redpilldessert ago

Ever thought of using something like Google's pagerank algorithm to determine a user's reputation? The more someone is upvoted, the more influence their own upvotes are worth. It's really elegant and potentially does away with the complexity of deciding how much someone has 'contributed' to a sub

TrumpTheGodEmperor ago

I really like this idea, would this also work in the following way:

Person A has 10 voting power

Person B has 5 voting power

Person C has 1 voting power

A voting on C would have a bigger impact on the voting power of C then if B would have voted on C. So the higher your voting power, the more your vote is worth?

I remember newgrounds.com having used a system like this for years and as far as I know it has been pretty successful.

fusir ago

I think it should taper though. Either the voting power is the sqrt or the log of the number of votes you have. I would say sqrt. So if you have 100 votes you would have a voting power of 10. Having 1000 votes gives you a voting power of 31.

The problem is this can be botted like crazy. Not only could the bots vote eachother up more regularly but have more impact as they vote themselves up.

Perhapse voting aleviates yourself of some power.