(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
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[–] 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.
[–] PeaceSeeker [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Even the metrics that caused all those vote manipulation bans had the ones banned individually reviewed before they were banned. If the person doing the voting doesn't know what behaviour is acceptable, how will the one doing the review?
The limits should at least be more clearly defined than they are. I don't think addressing the area from which people downvote is unreasonable, given that "inorganic voting" by individuals is as much a concern as voting with alts.
[–] 19101313? 1 point 0 points 1 point (+1|-1) ago
Human review requires human resources. Human resources require growth. Growth requires users do not intentionally silence other users to run them off the platform, as we have witnessed for years.
I feel like I'm living in clown world when everyone else seems to think it's a great idea to run people away from the community while at the same time demanding features which require those very same users stop running people off the community.
[–] [deleted] 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago (edited ago)
[–] PeaceSeeker [S] ago (edited ago)
Hmm, that idea has some promise I think. If a sitewide rule were introduced where you can't downvote a user more than 3 times a day (in conjunction with downvoting having to be done the day a comment is made / within 24 hours of a comment being made), without also upvoting them elsewhere, then that too would severely limit the effectiveness of any kind of brigading. It would require far more alts be used, which would in turn enable Voat to make account relation connections.
/u/PuttItOut, has this idea been considered? Is the issue that it would be considered too serious a limitation?
EDIT: Actually, there may be some similarities here with the solution to downvoting I presented a while back. Can't remember for sure, would have to check.
[–] 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
[–] PeaceSeeker [S] ago
It may be, but if so users should be told.
The fear seems to be that going into specifics would enable the manipulators to dodge detection...but if we are specific enough, what means are they left with. "Oh, I guess I'll just downvote him whenever I see him!" But isn't that organic, and therefore acceptable? Setting specific boundaries will at least reduce the severity of manipulation if it won't outright do away with it, while giving innocent users a clear understanding of what they can and cannot do.
[–] 19101324? 1 point -1 points 0 points (+0|-1) ago
If I were a betting man, by and large I would guess 100% of the users who complained about being given a warning had, at some point in the past, clicked a users profile and opened everything they could and either up or down voted that specific user, from their user profile page. This is one of those inorganic vs. organic things that I have yet to see two people in the community share the same opinion on, yet is an obvious elephant in the room.