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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captainstrange ago
Dude, I could
write a script to scrape social media for conversations,
connect over vpn or other methods,
create dozens of profiles with faked useragents for a headless browser, do this every day to age some of the accounts,
let some of these accounts age, while I use others to auto-post and cross-post with the aforementioned scrapper
use a dictionary to find+replace words in the scrapped conversations with synonyms
even vary the writing style, with or without emojis, with or without caps, inserting ums and ahs, preference for commas or not, shorter or longer responses, etc.
Manually log in to a handful of accounts each day to push more important, specific agendas on multiple fronts, like getting Puttitout to favor committees, or abusable spam buttons, or even user take over of subverses--or creating the impression that manual solutions where every report has to be reviewed is the answer (and then abusing the hell out of that system in order to slowly push a crisis where he reconsiders bringing on mods or community members who are really just the hypothetical shill accounts.)
I'm not saying I do any of this. I don't, but I'm a mediocre scripter and it is well within my reach. Imagine what the share blue cunts and other private disinfo bitches have available in terms of tools?
Edit: The ONLY thing that will work is being willing to adapt to the changes, on a semi-regular basis, like every 3-6 months to account for abuses of the system--and providing as MUCH transparency as possible.
Germ22 ago
All that can be done with scripts? Damn.
Kleyno ago
The system could be set so that in order to raise a no confidence vote, you would need to complete a complicated, multiple step captcha. And in order to vote, you also had to complete a captcha.
That should stop bots being able to auto raise and then vote on a no confidence vote in order to sway the result.
Won't do anything about someone determined enough to log into each alt individually and vote, but then again, what can be done against people willing to waste that much of their time?
captainstrange ago
Could just be solved with any off the shelf reinforcement algol or neural program interpreter system running on top of something like tensorflow. It would take a grad student hired off the internet maybe a weekends worth of wages. Captcha isn't the answer unfortunately.
xortuna ago
You'd want to wall off new users when a vote starts, i.e a user must of contributed to a sub before the vote started.