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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10247604? ago
More likely people who have been dedicated to fighting spam for years, like the /v/ReportSpammers folks. Their actions will be public. They will have no power you will not be able to see or criticize. If someone flags something as spam that is not spam you will be able to see it and call them out on it.
What exactly are you complaining about, in that case?
toobaditworks ago
Like me! Woot woot!
Except people do call you out on it even when it's completely obvious they are spamming the same domain... over and over and over.. like 20 post all the same domain but those people then attack me and claim I'm manipulating votes. Then they make post saying I'm banning websites from voat (this actually happened by the way). So then I have to go into my history and show I'm just reporting users who are spamming certain domains.
Meh. Whatever.
I want to continue to help. But being public is not such a great idea. Maybe being public to the admins and the moderators of reportspammers... but it sucks being put on a list by evil spammers who are breaking the rules and then try to get revenge on you.
Same shit happened on Reddit. I got banned by someone who I reported. I report a person breaking the rules and I get banned.... makes perfect sense...
10251636? ago
I respect what you and others go through to keep Voat clear of spam. If these changes are passed I suspect a more specific log citing your decision to flair certain content and what posts you are citing when making the flair will be made, in which case it should be more outwardly obvious to potential critics that your decision was justified.
Unfortunately for you or anyone doing this it remaining fully public will be a necessity. I would not support that direction otherwise. It is important that anyone and everyone have the ability to see what decisions were made and why. Fortunately there should be infrastructure in place to better equip you to defend yourself. As for retaliation, depending on the nature it might be bannable.
There is less of that on Voat. Soon we will even have ways of dethroning power mods -- and mods who ban based on grudges will not be free from such criticism, again because we keep things public here.
toobaditworks ago
Thanks for the comments. I appreciate the time you took to even consider my points of view.
I'll continue doing my temp work (because I know others do more than I) reporting spammers and doing whatever I can. If it hurts some spammers feelings well I won't take a grudge. If I have to be public then so be it. No worries here.