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 →
NeedleStack ago
Definitely remove such restrictions. Unpopular opinions deserve as much say as the others.
PuttItOut ago
Agree, we need to eliminate or modernize.
The particular problem with this one is that roughly 75% of heavily down voted accounts are uncharacteristically hostile and imo are purposefully seeking this response. The other segment is the side that is hurt by these restrictions.
VictorSteinerDavion ago
have negative CCP exist with a timed expiry.
As in, after n hours CCP reverts to the previous 24 hour period.
This prevents long term effects of one off pitchfork emporium sales events, but also permits an auto control on accounts that consistently gain negative CCP on purpose.
If an account gets 3 consecutive resets of negative CCP they enter into a 7 day expiry cycle. After 3 consecutive 7 day resets they account enters a 30 day reset envelope,
This can still be abused of course and mechanisms need to be conceived to prevent that, but the overall goal is to not have "trusted" users become the arbiters of what this community is and is not.
What it also might do is encourage the less civil users to find other means of communicating what they care about that don't involve hostility to the participating users.
The recent 'botting' events and other things I encounter daily show a clear need for the types of reforms you're proposing, but something I'm very weary of is assigning any kind of authority to subsets of users.
Reddit has shown, consistently, the enabling of cabal user groups is the first step to removing free speech of the community.
Almost all the tasks involved in stopping spammers and abusive users can be designed into automatic responses as a software tool, including remediation and reconciliation for when it goes wrong.