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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Dibgick ago
Stop restricting accounts. Focus on repetitive content.
If a user or many users post the same thing with the exact same wording and links over and over again, auto-mark the posts as spam and ban the linked site.
Since most spammers are clickbaiters that should do.
A spam button is easily abused as you can see in Twitter and Facebook where unpopular stuff is constantly false-reported as spam by manchildren.
PuttItOut ago
We will build in a confidence interval if we use the spam reports as a metric. I will not allow brigading of reports to trigger actions unless I can verify some accuracy.
Dibgick ago
Thresholds are very easy to defeat. Some one could build their own little army of spam-reporting bots to silence opposing views.
Making it expensive to report spam would solve the problem if you want to go that way.
If the reporting account gets subtracted 20 ccp points every time it reports a post would fix frivolous reporting.