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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10248270? ago
The only way they could be corrupt is if they flag something as spam that is not spam, and if they do this all of us will know and we will have grounds for replacing them.
UlyssesEMcGill ago
v/TheCouncilOf7
10250809? ago
You are comparing a group of people who voluntarily classify spam reports in full transparency to the seven most powerful families on Earth? Seriously? That is the argument you people are making now?
UlyssesEMcGill ago
I was suggesting a subverse name.
I don't know about families, but it was intended to be a nod to Imaginationland's Council of 7 (Aslan, Jesus, Gandalf, Superman, Popeye, Santa, and Captain Planet (or 7 different characters, I don't remember)).
I think it's a good idea, but is it a site wide priviliege? 1000 users? 50? 7?
10250904? ago
It's just one approach of many. We could try to send reports out randomly to users to confirm, but there are many issues with that. We could host polls to be voted on for every report, but that's too slow. Having a team of vetted users who are focused on flairing spam as spam and not-spam as not-spam, whose actions are logged publicly, seems the best solution to me if we are to use reports to impose restrictions instead of downvotes. That said, the more the merrier I guess, as long as everyone does their job properly. Those who don't get the boot.