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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Typo ago
MH101 and Amalek are gone right now. Submission spam is much more problematic than comment spam. Keep the restrictions in place but make it for submissions and not comments. That will slow the spammers down. See how it works out and then find a new solution if that doesn't work.
Maybe this isn't the best way to do it because it will cause problems for people with unpopular opinions but I feel like at this point, comments aren't a problem when it comes to spam. Any system in place restricting how many comments someone can post is unnecessary at this point in time.
Crensch ago
I posit that comments aren't a problem because of this limitation. Only spam gets a free ride until the small group of spamlords finally gets to them.