I have made a decision to alter and/or remove various restrictions on Voat. I’ve thought a lot about this and it’s something both @Atko and I believe needs to be reevaluated.
Voat has always had a problem with spam. @Amalek would spam posts and hijack the new queue making it unusable. MH101 and then later @SaneGoatiSwear would hijack comment pages making them unusable. The rules Voat uses were put in place in to combat this behavior. They are old rules, mostly remaining unchanged from the initial versions of this site. Most, if not all, of the rules were in direct response to spam attacks. It was never Voat’s intention to limit non-spam accounts, but this is what has happened as an indirect result of these rules.
Voat will not keep in place a system that permanently limits a segment of users from debating and conversing. This isn’t Free Speech as I see it or as I want it.
Voat will shortly be going live with a new code base, and I want to have a new system designed and ready for when this happens, so I am posting this announcement to get feedback from the community.
The main areas of concern:
- Commenting restrictions on negative CCP accounts that aren't spamming their comments
- Limiting any account that spam comments
TL;DR
We need to allow unpopular opinions while preventing comment spam.
How do we do it?
All options are on the table
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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10246452? ago
Proposal: limitations are removed or lessened for users with negative CCP, but their names show up in a color indicating that there's a greater chance they're a detractor from the site. This would remove limitations for most, but could end up punishing some unlucky few (who happen to have unpopular opinions on enough topics to be downvoted). The benefit, however, would be that negative CCP ends up being like pink hair on an SJW: Aposematism, a warning to others.
SexMachine ago
I don't like this idea. Each comment should be judged by the contribution to the conversation. Putting a Jew star on people with negative CCP will make people judge them immediately, without reading their comment.
10246620? ago
A username is already a type of Jew star: it helps you form an impression as to how a person argues and what their motivations might be. Why not just make all of Voat anonymous like 4chan? And if you do that, you can't then say "oh, it's @Amalek, I know from his 500 spammed threads that he's here to detract from the site, and any good points he make are accidental and even tangential to his obvious purpose."
SexMachine ago
There are anon subverses. If there's a user posting bs consistently in the comments, the subverse owner can alter the CSS to tag the user as a problem user.
I think this should be left to the subverse owners' discretion, not the admin. Maybe include the feature as an option for subverse moderators, but not make it site wide.