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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Techman ago
I downvote and also report spam comments. The downvote eventually will collapse it in the thread and the spam button hopefully gets to community moderators at some point so that they can remove the comment.
PuttItOut ago
Hey, you've turned this account around (hopefully legitimately) because last time I looked it was in the negatives.
The reporting option is surely on the table, but it would have to be a fairly sophisticated to work half way decently.
Techman ago
I don't remember really having a negative record, but you can bet it's from the Techtronix (me) vs Baphonet vs GoatChat vs Moe vs Failure vs whatever if I really did have a negative record.
I submit user accounts to /v/reportspammers when I see obvious spammers. It's like /r/spam before they shut it down.