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 →
10246470? ago
:D
Spam is an issue and we don't want it overrunning the website. But at the same time you're right, these restrictions have been inhibiting people who have done nothing wrong but share too many unpopular opinions, and it isn't in the spirit of Voat.
We should consider what tools we have available. The /v/ReportSpammers community is very hard-working and dedicated to keeping Voat free of spam, and it is a community very capable of growing. Spam is against Voat's rules; accounts that spam get permanently banned from the website. We determine that accounts are spamming by responding to user reports against specific accounts, evaluating their comments / submissions, and then deciding if they have indeed spammed. If they have, you eventually ban them. I think that's the basic process.
Waiting for a spammer to accrue negative CCP is actually relatively slow. What we could do instead is this: if an account receives spam reports, and one of the trusted community members in /v/ReportSpammers marks the report as actual spam, then upon that marking the account could be restricted until such time as you or someone else is able to review the reports and ban the guilty users.
As far as I am aware this follows the same process as right now, except it will not restrict any account's commenting ability based on CCP, only on confirmed spam reports. As I understand it this should restrict guilty accounts much faster than negative CCP would have, without restricting non-spam accounts. All we require is a sufficiently large and trusted report marker section of the community, and then the awareness of the Voat community at large to place spam reports instead of downvotes in the first place.
The community at large can vote on who they want / trust to mark reports as actual spam, and we can keep those who have been doing a perfect job already (@Cynabuns namely. I'm sure @NeedleStack would do well also).
I can adjust anything I've written above for feasibility reasons but I think some interpretation of this will work for Voat well without punishing the innocent.
Crensch ago
The problem is that some of these "unpopular opinions" are actually paid-for opinions.
I know of people with unpopular opinions that don't garner downvotes. I've seen it happen all the time, actually.
The ones with downvotes were rude, or expected everyone to agree with them without supporting their position. Or they were MSM narratives that are very obviously manufactured and being espoused by suspicious usernames.
10248263? ago
I don't disagree with any of that, but at the same time we cannot say with certainty that a bunch of people behaving like autists or aggressively and espousing unpopular opinions are necessarily paid shills. Are we not, who possess free speech, strong enough to refute their baseless claims without limiting the number of claims they can make per day? If they spam their paid viewpoints they will get banned for spam; if they manipulate votes so that they can downvote they will get banned for manipulation -- but if they are just commenting as much as any other user and they happen to get downvoted for it, what justification do we really have for restricting their speech? We are stronger than that, and they are weaker than for us to need to restrict them.
Crensch ago
What we can do currently is force them to jump one single hurdle to continue posting here. A hurdle I posit is extremely trivial to overcome.
I think you're missing some of my point here. When 5/6 of the comments are from those paid-for liars, those looking for the truth will stop looking and upvoating, and those writing the truth will conclude that their input is not appreciated.
The truth is strong enough to survive when not drowned out by bullshit. If the lies had to meet some kind of criteria that the truth requires by definition, the truth would always win.
I think we've seen the truth lose plenty of times IRL to a hailstorm of lies, because lies are held to absolutely no standard, and the liars go unpunished.
Is not the definition of spam currently just posting the same words over and over? How would you justify calling it spam when it's really just 12 "users" in cubicles posting their "thoughts" that aren't just copy-pasted?
As it stands, I think it's difficult enough pinpointing these users when the users of the site are working to do so. We seem to be right often enough, though.
The users downvoated into restrictions didn't get there from simply unpopular opinions. Or if they did, they only posted unpopular opinions, which I posit is simply trolling.
Anyone can get plenty of upvotes here without much effort. Even those heavily downvoted users can make comments with +7 if they set aside their "unpopular" opinions for a single comment. Are we saying that asking them to do that more is too much?
The truth is only strong when it's not drowned out by half-truths, lies, and irrelevancies.
All of which would have garnered downvotes, and allowed the users to limit that username.
Imagine a username that goes around and lies on purpose. Every comment. Constantly. In order to make himself seen and heard.
No downvotes can stop him.
Now there's 10 of them.
Or 20. Paid for.
Only some small amount of mods or admins or council members to deal with them. Only nobody can, because they're not spamming.
Every political post, and comment in that post, is now responded to by 20 of these "users".
No hail of downvotes can stop them. 20 clicks of downvotes by five real users to even hide them - if they don't get upvoted a bit by each other.
But maybe I'm missing something. Some puzzle-piece of information that didn't fit.
10248596? ago
Though is is rational and reasonable on the surface, what it boils down to is: "Behave the way I want you to or have your speech restricted" which just isn't freedom of speech. If people aren't spamming or otherwise breaking the site, they ought to be able to post a bunch of incoherent nonsense as often the rest of us can post our coherent nonsense. We can downvote them and push their incoherence out of sight, at least.
But we will identify the paid comments if they are so evident, we will downvote them, and they will be pushed to the bottom, leaving only the quality comments we are looking for at the top, no?
And we can continue to moderate in this way as a community. If only a few words are changed from a two paragraph rant, it will still be considered spam. If the same argument is made, but re-typed every time, and it is posted to twenty threads in five minutes, that's probably spam. These are the judgments we can make transparently and act on, and if there is outcry there can be reversals.
Again, a fair point, but they are free to troll without consequence so long as the trolling is not actual spam etc..
Notice the key words in that definition: short span. If the bullshit is essentially the same then the community might decide it's spam. Of course we have to be careful about this which is why its all transparent. But if five 30 minute accounts show up and fill a thread with different ramblings about how great Stalin's USSR was, we can probably safely deduce it's spam and ban the accounts if it is truly agreed to be spam. IF NOT we can downvote and the comments will collapse out of sight anyway.
Downvotes push his comments out of sight. Same with the other 20. If they spam (or the accounts are linked, thus confirming the spam) they'll be banned. All the arguments I'm making from the point of "ban the spammers" depends on it being obvious spam, though, which is why generally I'm responding with "downvotes still hide the shills/ lies"
Crensch ago
No, I view it as paying for that freedom of speech. Freedom isn't free. Some things must be sacrificed in order to have a government that will protect you from the other assholes that want to come in and make you not free.
When you come to this site, you are entering a community, and while you have the right to say what you want, there's still a bare minimum effort needed to be a part of this community. Voat exists because people contribute things here. They contribute things here because there's a community here to share their ideas with.
It's like moving into a neighborhood. Keep your damn grass cut, or you ruin the place for everyone around you.
I'm not really sure I believe what I just read. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, so please, explain yourself here. To give you an idea, this sounds a lot like Merkel of Germany style rhetoric.
Until we can't, or until it's not worth it.
To continue the neighborhood analogy, neighbors have to come and mow your lawn to keep the place up. Then more lazy fucks move in, and more neighbors need to mow their lawns. At some point, those neighbors are just going to stop or move away.
All it takes is a few people paid to say about the same thing constantly. They won't be copy-pasting, they'll be rewording it entirely. No, they're not "spamming" but they're not legitimate either, and their comments encroach on the legitimate real estate of the site.
Some small group of volunteers are needed to make these judgments that will likely pile up like the current submission spam. These volunteers will get to parse how much of these "users" crap before making a decision?
At what point do those volunteers decide that it's not worth it?
Of course they are, but because they are limited by the users on how much real estate they can cover, the trolls never became more than a small group of semi-irritating staples of the Voat diet. Once the limitations are gone, they'll have no reason to not take up as much real estate as they can.
And like I said, users are going to just stop mowing their lawns so other users don't have to see their comments.
No... no no. That is absolutely, 100% addressed by pointing out that any length of time will result in exponentially more bullshit than truth. Please don't go there, this is the second line of yours that I cannot accept.
Those 5 accounts with their 30 minutes just caused how much work for us? How much time and effort and resources? Are we talking all hypotheticals here or are we actually addressing the realities of these situations?
A simple equation:
Troll/shill/spammer time X
Voat volunteer time Y
If X - Y is not a decently-sized number, Y will be buried in actions by X.
Some small, in-control group of neighbors have to now not only mow the lawns, but pick up the trash in the yard.
And we're not even talking about the accounts that aren't just 30 minutes old.
I realize this, but that small group determining spam is just going to get completely snowed under now. Bannings don't really work, since you can just make a new account in 10 seconds.
The only thing combating this was that every user could waste a troll/shill's 10s, and cause them to waste 5s switching between usernames constantly. We'd crowdsource mowing their lawn and picking up their trash between ALL of the users, and I posit that's why comments aren't really an issue now.
I'm arguing from a position of, "it's working, things are good now, everyone has to pay property taxes". Property taxes being another form of the mowing the lawn analogy. If you're not free because you have to mow your lawn, or pay property taxes, then nobody is free, and the concept of freedom in the context it's being used here is an absurdity.
10249070? ago
If someone bursts down your door with an ax the government isn't going to save you or your family. That's why we pursue liberty (i.e. maximized power over self) -- so we can bear arms and defend ourselves. Now, freedom does come with substantially increased responsibility, because it is a form of power. That responsibility includes not going into the town square and screeching at the top of your lungs for hours, and speaking in moderation so that others have the opportunity to speak themselves. In a forum setting this translates to: don't spam. That's why spamming is a bannable offense. Lies, though, should fall within freedom, not an abuse of freedom. Same with "well-manneredness".
The grass analogy is good. Mowing lawns should not be enforced by laws, but they should still be mowed out of respect for neighbours. Likewise, spam should be enforced, but manners and truth-telling should not be -- but users should still be well-mannered and tell the truth. Sometimes they won't; that's their own immorality coming to light, but it is not our place to ban them for it. What we can do is downvote them so their words are hidden, at least.
I don't understand what issue you are taking with it. If people want to post incoherence, let them. That's their freedom. If they want to spam it that's another issue, for the reasons I stated above.
If we find ourselves unable to downvote obvious shills it is because those shills are buying upvotes, which Putt can now easily detect and ban them for. As for our energy to downvote, that's not going anywhere unless the shills are so overwhelmingly present that surely a community will be able to identify spammers.
We've had users doing this for two years, suffering through all the reports, and they still think it's worth it. Because they care about Voat and freedom.
But the restrictions aren't going anywhere! They're just being assigned in a different way.
I get that. We are only discussing possibilities. No system will be introduced that works worse than the one we have now. If we make changes and all of a sudden Voat is unusable no matter how hard we work, we will return to the previous system. But is seems possible to me that using a report feature instead of downvotes can achieve the same effect without jeopardizing innocent users. That's all.
Crensch ago
Apologies, I'm in a situation right now where I cannot respond to each point as I'd like, but a smaller response is something I can manage, so here goes:
I had the feeling there was some information I wasn't privy to. I think your response here has alluded to some of that.
My concerns are that putt and the spammer groups will be overwhelmed with reports. That this change will cause the burden to be pushed upwards.
That even if these spammer groups are identified, it won't hurt them because they can have hundreds of sleeper usernames. But if Putt can combat that as well, then there's no problem.
My concern is when/if it becomes a situation where their efforts don't actually make a dent in the workload. Instead of all the users sharing it, they get all of it - and it'd be an easy weakpoint to attack if you wanted to subvert this place.
10249454? ago
I fully understand those concerns; they are legitimate. We won't be able to properly know how manageable such a change -- if implemented at all -- will be unless we try. With enough people on board I think we could manage it. We could assign the responsibility of flagging reports to random users, but then we run into the issue of inactive users winding up with calls for jury duty.