Tonight is not going to be about links. It’s going to be about parasites, and what happens when you kick the hornets nest.

Unfortunately, there are people on Voat who agree to follow Voat’s rules, and there are people on Voat who don’t.

These parasites are at war with Voat, and want to see it fail. They especially don't want you to read the ideas or contribute your own opinions on how to improve Voat. It would be a real shame if you happened to see something they absolutely do NOT want you to read.

The community can only be so easily divided because the typical person doesn't spend all day on Voat. It's easy to see just brief interactions with another user and just forget them entirely. Some people, when observed for a while, appear outright coordinated; abusing things like the voting system to effect the experience of others - behavior that runs off users and diminishes the community over time.

I strongly believe that the entire community can contribute to the discussions on these ides. I also personally believe that transparency in the voting system is one of many options which are on the table to combat the behavior that is running rampant today, in part because of the anonymous abuse of a voting system that really only exists to prevent top-level spam and help prioritize user content is pointless after 100CCP, anyway. CCP is just make-believe and the points don't matter.

Simply put, a good argument for an open voting system is that it would illuminate the outside untrained observer to be able to see for themselves WHO is doing this behavior, and makes it easy to identify the liars and hypocrites based on what they say. Shining a light in this particular darkness seems like a painless compromise for privacy that maintains Free Speech within U.S. law as @PuttItOut has shown is his purpose for Voat and his rules for maintaining it.

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There are simply people who want to watch the world burn. At times, I've been one of them. No more. Once you’ve been targeted by the subversive elements, you can't ask simple questions or have a candid conversation with the community, because nobody else will see it and they will subvert the conversation by manipulating the votes as a group with the intention of censoring you if you dare ask the community for feedback.. You tell me if I was reacting too harshly, after days of constant bombardment from the same aggressive assholes.

These parasites infecting Voat are scared shitless of what would happen if the voting system was made transparent and everyone could easily see their actions. If voting is public, it's much harder to hide when a coordinated group is abusing a user. This holds incredible gravitas when the people who are abusing a user this way are also lying about the behavior to mislead the rest of the community. It is for this reason that I believe these parasites fear transparency more than anything.

I advocate you make your own opinions. I believe that Voat has a very simple set of rules and if you follow them and wish to see grow, then your behavior is demonstrated by action. I also think it's time to stop allowing these childish parasites openly subvert the community, run off new users, and secretly brigade others into thinking they have no voice.

Oh. Yeah. And I never had an opinion on the guy the entire time I've been here, but seriously, fuck Dial_Indicator. He's a drunken hobo lunatic and he's been chasing me around on so many accounts that I finally made a list of them here: https://voat.co/v/ProtectVoat/3246318