This is just a random idea that I wanted to get feedback on.
With Voat, one of the things we struggle with (on the backend) is the mutability of user votes (allowing a user to change previous votes on comments/submissions). When a user can change their vote (up to down or removing a previous vote) we can’t effectively deal with this data until it reaches the “archiving” phase, which is currently three months or 90 days.
If we can effectively “archive” user votes before this time we can do much more within the code base.
The idea is this:
User votes can not be changed after a 24-hour window (time period is variable, but shorter the better). This would mean that once a user has voted on a comment/submission, they are only free to change it within this window. After the 24 hours, it sticks and would be permanent.
What are the cons? How often would this be an issue? How often do you change a previous vote after 24 hours? Etc.
Let me know your thoughts on this.
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DayOfThePillow ago
So long as people can't edit their comments after the same amount of time it makes sense, otherwise you could change a massively upvoated post to something else to give the false impression that was the popular opinion.
subscribetopewdiepie ago
People can do that now, no one is going to go back to check and see if the comment they voted on changed.
DayOfThePillow ago
Yeah but people using the search function could get misled about a subject if it's been changed after it's moved on from the front pages.
subscribetopewdiepie ago
The point is that the proposed change wouldn't create that issue because someone could do it now. Plus I'm not sure it is a big enough problem to be worth worrying about.