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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Talc ago
The results are that spammers spew more crap than ever to the site (17/25 in all/new earlier today), but we're still restricted for downvoting the stuff. Well done, you've shitted up the place more efficiently than SRS/Shariablue/Amalek/SaneGoat/MH101/Errol combined.
voat is now nothing more than an end-run around the reader's adblocker, spam is slide-censoring the real content and preventing free speech, it's great if you want to see endless adverts for vietnamese airlines, paki hookers, shitty pirate streams, low quality diet supplements etc tho!
PuttItOut ago
We are working on this as down votes do nothing to help v/all/new.
Also voat has been running the same rules for years, so hence this post.
Talc ago
right this very minute, 14/25 on /v/all/new are spam, 15/25 on /v/all/new?page=1 are spam. This is absurd, it's hardly worth picking thru the spam to find the content, 2/3 spam is the threshold at which you will start losing users. Your slow-motion spam bans are encouraging spammers to stick around, they know their posts will stay up here for days or weeks, and it's a damn site cheaper to buy a new domain once every few weeks and steal advertising than it is to buy advertising (true for any business which is seeking to grab a quick profit rather than build a trusted brand name).
Whatever you do about the spam problem, you need to make the ban hammer fall on spammers within hours or less of them being reported if you want to deter them, currently there are spammers being reported and still spewing literally weeks later (this deters the site user from reporting, encourages the spammer to keep spamming).
Prediction: If you don't do something effective, voat will be just like the late 90s FFA boards within another 18 months, lots of spambots posting ads but no humans posting content or even reading the site.