To my knowledge, nobody has ever been restricted by -100 with the exception of @MightyYetGentle1488 aka sanegoat aka amalek.

He is literally the only person that has suffered from this, and had to make 1000 alts and an upvote bot to combat this. There have been a few more obvious trolls who probably don't care and enjoy the reputation of "the most downvoated person".

And the only reason why the above mentioned user receives so much dowvoats from everyone is because of his spam campaign against you and Atko. We actually believe that aggression played a role in atko's leaving, even tho he never said it did.

Everybody was laughing when amalek was about the anti-jew spam. Its when the hostility was turned against you two and fuzzy that everybody started pushing back against him.

In my opinion, you should have been more aggressive with the ban hammer back then. Memebr when you threatened to ban him and your comment received 6milion upvotes? Absolute support from the community because we knew that that situation had nothing to do with "freedom to state an unpopular opinion" but obvious destructive behavior due to mental illness and a complete lack of a life. Possibly even money involved tho various findings that came later just show mental illness.

So i don't think you need to feel bad because in the end those restrictions affected only one user that should have been banned long time ago for destructive behavior anyway.

With all that said, now that things have calmed down, removing that restriction might be a good idea, but ONLY if you can get decent control over spammers with a combination of both ban hammer and ALT CONTROL/limitation, something that was never even attempted. If it can even be controlled.

Here's one that people don't agree with: registering a voat account should require an e-mail and have a delay. It doesn't raise privacy concerns because everybody has a throwaway email, or can easily make one.

That extra step, plus a 24 delay means nothing to a real user who needs one account, but make it one more annoying step for spammers.

Who ever doesn't have the patience for that once, probably isn't here to contribute anyway. Think voat is passed that point where it needs to make it super easy just to attract as many users as possible just to get up and running.

Also, you mentioned you would clean up all the "sleeper" accounts that all the shithead redditor scum from r/thedonald made in an attempt to overpower v/thedonald . Deleting those accounts, requiring an e-mail and a 24h delay for new ones, would keep those kinds of mass actions at bay to a small degree. That's something to keep in mind.