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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rwbj ago

I always wondered why we don't swap to an entirely decentralized (from subs) user based system. You submit a post and you can tag it with whatever you want - space, technology, whatever, midget porn and however many tags you want. Users default to viewing all tags. They can then change their preferred tags as they see fit. Add an ability subscribe to (higher priority listing) or block tags and you have a nice robust, decentralized system. Even better one auto-generated tag would be the user that submitted it meaning people could easily see content from users they find interesting, or block content from those whose content they find little value in.

Some really cool perks:

  • Solves the 'Wow I found a cool article and I have no clue where to submit to to.' problem.

  • Lets users find material they're interested in more easily. I like space related stuff. Turns out a space related topic only got submitted to /v/ObscureSpaceSub. That sucks. If instead the submitter could simply tag it space, obscure space thing, midget porn then I'd definitely be able to find it.

  • No need for mods of any sort, which means no mod drama of any sort.

  • Users could tag their content with a custom tag to create a community around that. For instance SBBH could simply tag their stuff SBBH.

playitagainsam ago

I love this idea about tags. I think the infrastructure is so different that it'd be easier to create a new site than redesign this one.

What stops some from posting say, cat pics, and tagging them /#space or /#technology? I could block users, but someone with a VPN could make a million alts and ruin the feed for an hour or so. Do we end up with mods? Give users power to vote whether something is relevant based on the votes of their previous posts with that tag?

rwbj ago

Definitely a tricky problem for all discussion platforms where any solution opens up new problems. One idea would also be to let users tag posts, and the weighting is something that would be considered in its visibility. For instance imagine you submit a cat post as a space post. Well you'd have one space tag, and then presumably lots of cat tags from other users. This would also help in general since imagine somebody submits a space post, but it also has interest to technology (but wasn't initially tagged as such) - users could fix it by tagging it and helping bring it to the attention of people that might not be subscribed to space but are to technology.

Our hypothetical mass spammer could then off course also mass tag his own posts, but that's a social problem that you have to deal with in a variety of ways on all platforms - like ensuring registering a million accounts is made sufficiently cumbersome to be a deterrent.

playitagainsam ago

I think one way to improve this model is to rank users, in a sense, by the quality of your posts. So if I earn 10,000 karma posting space tags, then when I tag something as space, my tag has equal weight to 10,000 spammers with no space karma.

It is still possible for malicious users to circumvent this, so it's probably best to start small and invite only while working out the bugs. Just need a bored developer. @go1dfish, @Peacekeeper, how bored are you or your friends? ;p Know anywhere to recruit?

rwbj ago

Definitely a good possibility. On the other hand at the minimum I'd make it a logarithmic scale to try to avoid incentivizing karma whoring. I sometimes wonder if these points even really make all that much a better filter than just a chronological ordering. They seem to lead to more drama and gaming than actually significantly improving the user experience.