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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TraditionalHusband ago
Can you tie restrictions to IP addresses rather than individual accounts? If someone like sanegoat is hopping between alts on the same IP (or multiple IPs used in the past), the codebase could automatically slow down his posting.
Making spammers burn an IP address for each alt seems like a decent way to slow them down.
PuttItOut ago
IP restrictions are useless. System has to be dynamic and based on user activity.
TraditionalHusband ago
I was thinking along the lines of "you're doing that too fast". If it's tied to each account, ten guys can sit in a room and shill every X seconds. If it's tied to an IP, the group of ten can't post any faster than an individual.
If combined with a list of previously associated IPs, they could be slowed down even if each posted from a separate location (at the cost of slowing down people in coffee shops.)