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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KingoftheMolePeople ago
Remove restrictions from Negative accts. Put in place a Spam button. Once an account has X number of Spam button reports, acct restrictions go into effect. To prevent abuse, if the restrictions are refuted("I am not spamming"), upon investigation, anyone found to be abusing the Spam button faces consequences, from restrictions themselves to a full on site ban.
10246632? ago
I have suggested this in the past, and I think it is close to the best solution. However, as you've identified, people can abuse the button, meaning innocent people can very easily be shut down if ten or so people cooperate to "report them for spam". Notice how you've said "if the restrictions are refuted" -- well who refutes them? A team of trusted community members, surely -- Putt can't do it himself. Well, if we're going to have a team on Voat dedicated to flagging spam reports as real or not (we have this already, by he way, with /v/ReportSpammers, and they do fantastically) then we might as well alter their approach. Instead of applying restrictions after X number of reports, apply restrictions after the "refutation team" has flagged the report as legitimate spam. That way no innocent account will be wrongly restricted (unless the refutation team messes up, but they will be accountable for that, it will be easier to keep track of, and historically they've been good at not messing up as far as I can tell.).
glennvtx ago
We can avoid "trusted users" by creating a spam button, that can only be used X number of times in a period, and this period could increase or decrease based on a number of factors. When a post is marked spam, it could be minimized for a specified period, and it's spam button indicate the community has marked it as spam, possibly allow you to "unspam".
10263208? ago
There are ups and downs with this system. Bots could game it and non spam could be hidden
glennvtx ago
The spam button would cease to function for a period of time afterwards, dependant upon different factors, this would lessen the effect bots could have. Once something is marked as spam by enough users, the content could be shown in the sidebar to random users, asking if it really is spam or not.