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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VIP740 ago
Here's an option that could mitigate forms of spam to an extent: Rather than just testing for duplicates when submissions are given, simply put a filter on the user end that shows the first link posted, and ignores duplicate posts so the user doesn't see them. This would make alt accounts useless for flooding v/all.
For users who are penalized or restricted for any reason, allow them to respond to posts on their own thread or responses to their posts; and allow them to post in their own sub-verse.
Give each user a value contribution rating that levels out over time. When users get upvotes their value rises, and it falls when they're down-voted. This rating will be factored into the comment sorting along with the up-votes/down-votes on the post itself. So the posts of someone who's been consistently bad for a day start with a penalty, and someone who's received more upvotes essentially gets extra points factored into their posts.
captainstrange ago
It's trivial to write a script that will take anything you write and replace a subset of randomly selected word with randomly selected synonyms and equivalent phrases.