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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OracleofEpirus ago
The core problem as I see it is that voats are currently both single-dimensional and rate-unlimited. You literally have no way (that is not NP-complete) of differentiating between "This is spam" and "This is a waste of my time", and you have infinite amounts of it. Long story short, there's no way to do what you want while those two attributes exist -- even one of them can be very hard to deal with. Add that to all the users and the posts and comments each user can make, and it gets out of hand very quickly.
Both those issues need to be dealt with before any solution can work. Otherwise, you're going to run straight into a lot of issues that already exist in other places.
One of the methods I've seen on making voating less single-dimensional is to add a descriptor to the vote. That way both posts and comments can be voated as +1 Informative, +1 Pron, -1 Old, -1 Illegal, and especially -1 Spam. A previously very well functioning and popular site had this feature (which died due to allowing full user-inputted html and javascript). There may even be users of said SensibleErection.com floating around here. This is actually the way Steam games are tagged. A game is privately tagged by a user, and the publicly facing tags are generated from all private tags. It operates independently of the user ratings, and is indescribably better than searching with the pile of garbage that is the Google Play Store. (I was interested by a "Offline Games" list, and the second one was Summoner's War.) This is not the only way to make voats multi-dimensional, but it is one good way.
As for the other part, the only way to make something not rate-unlimited is to limit it in some fashion. It's going to be unpopular with some people, but there needs to be a quantitative cap on upvoats and downvoats that a single account can hand out per duration. That alone will both severely impair the ability to spam and allow unpopular opinions to a degree.
If an account can't downvoat until a certain condition is true, then fake accounts lose that much value, because the entire point of such a thing is to invest as little resources as possible for a gain. Legitimate users will use downvoats to hit spam, and not some random guy asking questions.
If an account can't upvoat unconditionally, then it becomes much harder to undo legitimate downvoats on spam and hater accounts. Legitimate users will upvoat things important to them, instead of every little thing they're interested in. Of course, it's entirely possible to have unconditional upvoating, but it requires safety mechanisms.
Think of voats as a resource. If a user has infinite of a particular resource, every single game ever devised will crash and burn. Every single thing somebody likes will be upvoated. Every single thing they dislike will be downvoated. There is zero neutral ground. But when people have to choose between spending limited resource on something they like and something they dislike, very close to 100% of people will spend that resource on something they like. If somebody spends a limited resource on a dislike, it's incredibly unlikely that they're doing it just to be a dick. (EX, you have ten dollars. You can spend ten dollars to spike that asshole's drink with laxative, or you can tell him to fuck off and buy yourself a [INSERT FOOD HERE]).
The method and particular limit on how many upvoats and downvoats a user can exercise can and should be discussed. The particular voat descriptors can also be discussed.
Also, I am against completely removing the part of the system that limits a user's ability to post or comment. It's not something that should be utilized frequently, but it's a tool that solves a particular problem. Refusing to use that tool is just an open invitation to let that problem run rampant.