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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KingoftheMolePeople ago
Remove restrictions from Negative accts. Put in place a Spam button. Once an account has X number of Spam button reports, acct restrictions go into effect. To prevent abuse, if the restrictions are refuted("I am not spamming"), upon investigation, anyone found to be abusing the Spam button faces consequences, from restrictions themselves to a full on site ban.
10246515? ago
Sounds like a big workload for the admins. And if users are placed into these positions, they can become like Reddit powerusers.
Zanbato ago
it doesn't have to be work for Admins. There could be a volunteer subvoat section where people could review cases.
NamelessCrewmember ago
Maybe volunteers who get a que of reviews at random to make sure they are being fair and not part of any clique.
SotiCoto ago
Could work. Would probably require context for fair judgement though, and odds are that the randoms wouldn't care much about that and would put minimal effort into it. Ostensibly neutral, but with a hidden bias against anything unclear.
NamelessCrewmember ago
I've made the same argument or government. Senators and representatives should be randomly assigned to registered voters, one year terms, same pay as they had plus expenses, stiff penalties for any provable instance of corruption involving payment. Through randomized crowd sourced rule, many of the problems of government could be removed.