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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bananapie62 ago
Can we also have the default comment sorting to 'new'? if we have it on top the only comments people will see is the 'popular' opinion echo chamber like Reddit and the unpopular opinion at the very bottom because of it being down voted below everything.
PuttItOut ago
Go into your profile and change it. That is how I have mine set and why I responded to you so quickly.
bananapie62 ago
I understand that, but I know many people just don't care about doing it, and that partially causes echo chambers in debate threads, especially when only one side of the argument is upvoted and everything else is downvoted. Maybe subs or threads can choose to be labeled as 'debate' or 'discussion' by the creator to have a thread sort by new for X amount of time and then switch to the user's default setting. This could also help put a stop to alt farms.
However this is a topic for after the spam is fixed, I have seen some good ideas and it seems like the best solution could be a combination of some ideas, but im sure you will make the best decision!
Thanks for all your hard work.
PuttItOut ago
Ok, I misunderstood you. The truth is we don't think the comment layout and presentation is good either, but until we have the time to address it, it's the best we have.