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
view the rest of the comments →
KingoftheMolePeople ago
Remove restrictions from Negative accts. Put in place a Spam button. Once an account has X number of Spam button reports, acct restrictions go into effect. To prevent abuse, if the restrictions are refuted("I am not spamming"), upon investigation, anyone found to be abusing the Spam button faces consequences, from restrictions themselves to a full on site ban.
10246632? ago
I have suggested this in the past, and I think it is close to the best solution. However, as you've identified, people can abuse the button, meaning innocent people can very easily be shut down if ten or so people cooperate to "report them for spam". Notice how you've said "if the restrictions are refuted" -- well who refutes them? A team of trusted community members, surely -- Putt can't do it himself. Well, if we're going to have a team on Voat dedicated to flagging spam reports as real or not (we have this already, by he way, with /v/ReportSpammers, and they do fantastically) then we might as well alter their approach. Instead of applying restrictions after X number of reports, apply restrictions after the "refutation team" has flagged the report as legitimate spam. That way no innocent account will be wrongly restricted (unless the refutation team messes up, but they will be accountable for that, it will be easier to keep track of, and historically they've been good at not messing up as far as I can tell.).
KingoftheMolePeople ago
What I meant was that if I get tagged as spam, I refute that I am spamming. The team then needs to verify what is true. But other than that yeah.
My idea just shifted the work from being done pre restrictions (as now) to post restrictions. Now, the Reportspammers look and verify and ban the spammer, mine is verified after auto restrictions.
sakuramboo ago
And if the reports come from throwaway/alt accounts, what's the real punishment for the brigaders?
KingoftheMolePeople ago
I think Peaceseeker solved this by tweaking my/his idea and having Reportthespammers verify that something is spam before any actions are taken. And if alts are used and it becomes a real problem Putt can (and has used) the tools to look for alt abuse. I think if someone is abusing the antispam system to brigade they should be site banned.
In the end any system we create will be gameable. There will always be a way and people who take advantage of the cracks w/in that system.
sakuramboo ago
And how do you verify that? What's to stop me from creating 10 alts, each with its own purpose (ie, use one to post news and politics, one to post funny stuff, etc) and build up the SCP and CCP, do everything behind tor and proxies, then use all 10 alts to report one account?
While I can understand you can look at patterns to see if its the same accounts targeting the same users, but then you need someone dedicate their time to verifying this.
10247253? ago
The point is that simply reporting an account will have no effect whatsoever. Once you use those ten accounts to report some random user, your reports will go to /v/ReportSpammers to be vetted. If the team there looks at what you've reported and says "Yup, this is spam" the accounts will be restricted until Putt bans them for spam.
All of the decisions made by the /v/ReportSpammers team will be public and they will be accountable for their decisions, so if someone is wrongly flaired as having spammed we can reverse their restrictions or ban and ask why the team member flaired it as spam in the first place.
sakuramboo ago
That's not a bad system, but how do we make sure that RS doesn't become operated by SRS-types? They were able to take over many subs on Reddit, how would we prevent something similar from happening here? That one subverse, with that much power, is a prime target for authoritarians to take over.
10247494? ago
The mod logs and flairing logs and anything else we require will be public. If someone working with RS is outed as being corrupted they will be removed. Putt has even said that the new codebase will allow communities to vote out power mods. So if someone from RS is not doing their job, they'll be removed and removed quickly, and the community will replace them with someone who will do their job properly.
sakuramboo ago
If a mod gets outed by the community forcefully do their actions get undone?
10247594? ago
I doubt every action they've every performed will be reversed -- that would be too difficult. But if a corrupt mod bans an innocent user from a subverse, or deletes acceptable content, or flairs non-spam as spam, surely these things will be undone by the non-corrupt mods that replace them.