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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