There was some discussion over XP on the miner post. I thought it would be a good idea to bring everything into a new post and discuss some other things like voting in general. Now is the best time to throw ideas around, before more features are worked on and they have to be changed.
XP
At the moment, the only two XP-related restrictions are captchas and sub creation. Captchas last until level 4 (I think, it may have been lowered, @pembo or @Polsaker please correct me), and sub creation becomes possible at level 2. I am not in favour of applying any comment or posting restrictions based on XP or account age like Voat did, and I suspect that others will agree. In my opinion, that was a bad response to try and curb the influx from Reddit when their servers started shitting themselves.
One of the proposed ideas for XP levels was to give users the ability to customise their profile with CSS. For example, reaching level 10 might unlock a certain part of the profile page that could then be edited.
Are there any features you would like to see attached to XP, or features you want removed/changed?
Voting
There has been some progress on the voting system recently, though it hasn't been finished yet. @pembo made some analytics tools for votes that mods will be able to use to see voting patterns on posts, or the sub as a whole. The votes are mapped out on graphs and stuff, its pretty cool.
There is also a separate one for admins that may be a way to solve the age old problem of alt account brigading. Currently, admins have the ability to look at a post and see who upvoted/downvoted it. They can also see the creation date/time of accounts. The idea is that in the event of a sub, user or certain kind of post being heavily brigaded by alt accounts (which would be visible on the graph to mods and admins, because you would see a large streak of red happening), admins could then look at all of the brigaded posts and find the accounts downvoting them. Looking at this information in conjunction with account creation dates, it will be possible to pinpoint alt account groups.
It will not be possible to look at one post and immediately find a bunch of alts, but the patterns will be visible if they are looked at for a while. From this point, there are options that need to be considered. Here are a list of examples that we could do:
- Ban the alt accounts
- Retroactively remove downvotes (or upvotes) from brigaded posts
- Ban the alt accounts from the sub
- Give the information to the moderator and let them decide what to do
- Put captcha restrictions on the alt accounts
- Put post or comment restrictions on the accounts
- Put voting restrictions on the accounts
- Temporary account locks
- A combination of these things
- Nothing
Obviously, in the case of restricting accounts in any way, there would need to be a visible history of their involvement in brigading. I'm not suggesting that after 3 accounts are seen voting on the same post at similar times, they should immediately be banned. This is not the perfect solution, but it could solve a problem both Voat and Reddit has not been able to. It does not have any of the privacy concerns attached to other solutions such as browser fingerprinting or IP collection either.
Vote Sorts
Pembo suggested that in the case of retroactively removing votes cast by alt accounts, we should have a separate voting sort or toggle-able mode from hot/top/new that would show all posts with the votes unchanged. Whilst it is a good idea, I think it will ultimately be unnecessary because it will happen so infrequently. Transparency is important though, so perhaps we could add a flair to affected posts that show the original vote count.
Also, suggest any changes, additions or removals to vote sorts.
Agreed. An initial validation period to screw with the spammers and sock-puppets, is helpful. But once past that, I do not feel that there should be any differences in capability between a level 5 and a level 50, other than meaningless cosmetics (badges, xp, etc).
That sounds like a good tactic that will work for a bit. But if there's one thing I've learned from the spammers and agenda pushers, it's that they adapt quickly. So nothing is a permanent solution.
I also think that should be unnecessary. It should happen so seldom that a piece of flair would be enough. If it starts happening enough for people to want a closer look, then there's bigger problems that need to be dealt with.