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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10246382? ago
Or he should be able to comment, but only once every few minutes. And attempts to use alts to get around these deserved limitations should be subject to the same limitations, such that they don't give a user any relief from the earned punishment.
10246570? ago
@Andalusian1 makes a good point. Unpopularity should not be grounds for limiting someone's speech. The negative CCP restrictions were /only ever intended* to slow down spammers until Voat could get around to banning them. What really happens are the most annoying users, or just users with really unpopular views, end up only being able to place 10 comments a day. It's absurd.
Imagine this: one day reddit completely implodes, and all those insufferable Marxists come flocking over here. All of a sudden race realism, white nationalism, conservative principles, religion, anything that is a common or populr opinion on Voat is suddenly really unpopular. And we all get downvoted into negative CCP. Should our speech be restricted? No. That is the flaw here.
10246605? ago
I'm not sure any system could protect our culture from unchecked immigration, but if negative CCP does nothing then what's to stop a small faction from running a few accounts and constantly detracting and forum sliding? 4chan suffers from this, and the voting system is a weapon that can actually be used to combat it, but not without downsides, as you and the parent poster pointed out.
10246772? ago
If they are spamming anything the community can stop them. If they are not spamming then they are just saying stupid things; you can still downvote stupid things. Doing so simply won't stop them from continuing to say stupid things, as it shouldn't. The community here, as long as it remains free, will maintain the ability to challenge the claims of stupid people. As long as the stupid people aren't spamming their stupid ideas, they will not render the website unusable. This maximizes Voat's respect for freedom.