(Part 1)
Contents
Doxxing Part 2
Vote Manipulation
Conclusion
Doxxing Part 2
Furthermore, users should at all times possess the ability to remove information about themselves they introduced to Voat from Voat. users may change their mind, situations might change, more information in addition to original information might emerge that make the users less comfortable with the information's continued presence, etc, so at any point a user should be able to remove such information by citing the Doxx Rule.
Finally, clarification about what identities are affected should be made. If someone posts the publicly available address of a politician or celebrity who has nothing to do with Voat on Voat, should that user be banned and should that information be removed? If the identity of a murder victim is posted, should it be removed? The answer is probably "no", because in order for a website like Voat to be able to aggregate and discuss content, it needs to be able to discuss people, and that is going to involve names. Should names be acceptable, but addresses not, regardless of public availability? That might be reasonable, just to avoid overlap with the Illegal category where threats might be made (usually the only reason addresses are mentioned). At any rate this too needs to be discussed.
Back
Vote Manipulation
Finally Voat needs to determine how it is going to handle Vote Manipulation. Obviously it is a complex issue, but what we learned from recent events is that any rule that must be enforced without its details being publicly available is going to cause problems. The apparent problem with vote manipulation is that, if exact definitions are set, users will be able to change their behaviour in order to avoid being detected while still producing the results they desire. But I've been thinking about this, and frankly, if users have to adapt their behaviour to avoid breaking a rule, then either that new behaviour still breaks the rule or it doesn't. At some point the adaptation should no longer be considered a violation, and that is where the boundaries should be set and publicly stated. That way everyone can know the conditions and everyone can follow them without wondering if they are breaking a rule or not.
Obviously the intention of punishing vote manipulation is to allow voting on this website to be organic and not...manipulative. So questions we have to ask:
Is downvoting (or upvoting) every post within someone's history manipulation? How probable is it that someone might "organically" stumble upon all (or many) of a user's comments, and downvote (or upvote) them in their "natural environment"? Right now comments older than 7 days cannot be downvoted. The problem is, even if that were changed to 1 day, it would still be possible for a user to check another user's history every day and downvote all of the new comments, effectively downvoting their every comment in what is clearly inorganic. But this same thing could theoretically happen naturally if users frequent the same subverses. Let us say a user loves X, and another user hates X. Let us say the second user is only interested in commenting about X. User 1 and User 2 are therefore both likely to scroll through the comments of threads pertaining to X; User 1 sees all (or most of) User 2's anti-X comments, and downvotes them. How is any algorithm going to be able to distinguish from that and going through someone's history? One is organic, the other is not, but both results are the same. The only suggestion I can give is to have as a requirement the visiting of a comment history before considering apparent "brigading" as manipulation. That way users know to not user comment histories as ways of deciding what to vote on; let users know they can vote on what they find in the wild, but not what they find via histories. That why the Rule is stated and users can follow it.
Other issues like the use of alt accounts are less ambiguous; the trouble is identifying the accounts as alts.
Another issue is pinging users into threads, which in most situations is innocuous, but can be used in order to get "friends" to downvote threads one does not like, while simultaneously earning the pinger upvotes on comments made within said thread. Are votes that follow user pings to be considered manipulation? This is something that should be discussed, and stated if so.
Back
Conclusion
Voat has a small number of sitewide rules in place, but there is certainly some refinement necessary, especially if those who may be exploiting the lack of refinement to justify intolerable behaviour are to be justly dealt with.
/u/zyklon_b won't mind the use of his comments as examples, for all here is satire.
/S
Sort: Top
[–] heygeorge 0 points 4 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago
This goal may be unattainable. It merits thought (obviously the point of your post), but I don’t immediately see how publicly the line in the sand can be drawn without providing an immediate roadmap to abuse.
When Voat is slow (and sometimes when it is not), browsing through a user’s history is a worthy endeavor. I am a bit of a serial upvoter. Would I then be flagged and banned for this? Sometimes I will go through a farming commercial spammer’s history and downvote them as well. Should this behavior be bannable?
[–] PeaceSeeker [S] 0 points 4 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago
I mentioned how in many cases it may be impossible to properly distinguish between organic and inorganic voting (thus the recent controversy). It may therefore be necessary to rely on information about how users came to that thread, which may or may not involve items such as pinging and the viewing of comment histories immediately prior to voting.
I've asked these same questions with respect to /u/Mumbleberry, who also serially downvotes the histories of spammers. Putt acknowledged that this behaviour could before the ban reversals be picked up by the metrics -- /u/Mumbeberry received a vote manipulation warning for this reason.
It seems it will be a matter of either forbidding all history-voting or permitting all history voting. I don't see how an in between can be accomplished without issues like last time arising.
[–] heygeorge 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
Voat is and should be more complex than that. Arbitrary rules for the sake of... what sake? Avoiding subjectivity in van scripts? Maybe the answer to bans (and especially at Voat’s current scale) is better served by human review.
[–] [deleted] 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago (edited ago)
[–] argosciv 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
I'm quite confident that this metric is already in place. It wouldn't be very difficult though, if it isn't.
I may or may not write up a more detailed response regarding spam/pings/manipulation -- not firing on all cylinders at the moment.
@Crensch
[–] Dismember ago
People used to make a big deal of my downvoat count here on @Disappointed but this is exactly what I used to do. When Amalek was spamming death threats against the admins, I did the same thing. Then you would have retards from SDBH post (and ironically upvote brigade) threads to PV pointing out the mods upvote/downvote ratio and proudly pointing to their own where it was obvious they weren't doing their part in downvoting spammers and corporate shills. I used to read v/reportspammers and go to town on the shills there for hours at a time. Thats not really necessary now but at one point it was. I admit I also threw a lot of votes on @she at the time when there were no voting restrictions, but I don't think I'm alone there.
[–] SearchVoatBot 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
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[–] Nosferatjew 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
If rules are not clearly stated in the User Agreement, then it is not right or fair to ban users/accounts for violating them. Users/accounts that have been banned for violating these rules, prior to the inclusion of these rules in the User Agreement, should be unbanned, immediately.
[–] PeaceSeeker [S] ago
They are in the User Agreement, except for Vote Manipulation, but Putt made a formal announcement two years ago declaring that vote manipulation was bannable. It's not that the rules aren't rules, it's that the rules aren't clear in all cases, when when grey areas emerge people complain.
[–] think- 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
I don't think that should be considered manipulation. I often ping other users into research submissions on v/pizzagate , or Pizzagate related content on v/news they might be interested in, and it would be terrible if their upvoats or downvoats wouldn't count, only because I pinged them.
A feature like this could also be exploited. Let's say a shill makes a controversial post, and then pings all people who they think might downvoat the post. This way, they wouldn't be able to downvoat the post anymore.
[–] PeaceSeeker [S] 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
That's another good point. It's probably best to just not take pings into account, especially since users can organize off-site anyway.
[–] think- 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Agree.
[–] MrPim 1 point 2 points 3 points (+3|-1) ago
Users comment histories can be made private. There is really no need for anyones comment history to be publicly accessible and getting rid of it would eliminate the issue entirely.
[–] PeaceSeeker [S] 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
No they can't, unless you delete all your comments. Or are you suggesting this as a workaround? An interesting idea, but there is also value to being able to see histories, and taking that away would almost be a reddit-like action in the opposite direction of transparency.
[–] MrPim 1 point 1 point 2 points (+2|-1) ago
The comment history tab in my profile? It doesnt need to be there. And I can see no value in my being able to go through yours.
[–] Dortex 1 point 1 point 2 points (+2|-1) ago
The most obvious cases of vote manipulation around are all the loli subverses. They're constantly swamped with DV no matter what's posted and by who. Clearly the people involved are entirely uninterested in the topic, yet they keep coming back to vote it all down. You know what I did when Q kept shitting up my front page? I blocked them. I didn't keep the sub up so I can browse v/New and vote everything they post down.
A reasonable first line is that you should vote up something in the sub you're in. Ideally vote up as much as you do down. If you hate most or all of the content a sub puts out, shouldn't you just block it? You're clearly not the demographic.
[–] larryhuston 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
https://voat.co/v/ProtectVoat/3271064
[–] Maggotbait88 1 point 0 points 1 point (+1|-1) ago
I agree. If you consistently downvote 90% or more of a subs posts that should be considered vote manipulation.
[–] larryhuston 2 points -1 points 1 point (+1|-2) ago
Of course you agree with yourself, pedo
[–] Goathole ago
You are such a weaselly side of the mouth talking wordy bastard that it makes me puke. Get some fucking back bone you fuck.
You tooled out 500 words of text to say NOTHING. Like always.
Vote Manipulation
You're deliberately avoiding the real issue you fucking kike. All that text and not one fucking mention of it?
We get new users here all the time. NOT ALL OF THEM ARE GOOD. They all DEMAND THE FREE SPEECH that this site provides yet they have no respect for it. "Vote Manipulation" weeds these fucks out.
My username is lost tale and I was banned on reddit.
I hate how pretentious you are. You like to wiggle and weasel and be a fuck beneath paragraph after paragraph of bullshit. Get fucked.
[–] PeaceSeeker [S] ago
Jesus loves you.
Obviously Voat recognizes the userbase's ability to deal with spammers by downvoting. There wouldn't be CCP requirements and restrictions otherwise. But because of the importance of CCP on Voat it is important that users don't "cheat" to get around it (begging for upvotes / upvote farming would be vote manipulation, the very thing you complain about above).
[–] [deleted] 2 points 0 points 2 points (+2|-2) ago
[–] PeaceSeeker [S] 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
Thanks for participating in the discussion and not sperging out.