I propose that we should have some sort of bar to allow downvoting.
We seem to have a certain user who has been doing literally nothing but downvoting.
While this is little more than an annoyance. There's nothing stopping a herd of goats from showing up and manipulating the front page of our quaint little corner of the internet.
It's not the loss of imaginary points that I care about, it's the lack of visibility for the posts themselves.
To be fair. Voat showed me exactly what happens when a large group of extremists show up in a small community.
I watched voat go from something very similar to what we have here to the massive shit storm it currently is. All it took was FPH and coontown to completely change the focus and demographic of the community.
Yeah, a massive influx of ideologically charged people will have an impact on a community. The best bet is to keep the inflow slow enough to manage. However we have no control over newcomers, except to hide and hope we aren't discovered.
Part of the problem was concessions which undermined each community's ability to retain focus and protect from malicious actors. The definition of free speech was slowly expanded so that any moderation was in violation. The newcomers worked to banbait mods and push their ideology of 4chan style moderation.
(Politics sidenote: the actual refugee numbers that are causing the outrage are minuscule compared to the population. A few hundred thousand per year into a country of a few hundred million.
From the State department: "Since 1975, Americans have welcomed over 3 million refugees from all over the world"
3 million over 40 years.)
subs as pure tags
What do you mean by this?
I don't know what we're going to do about brigading, but I think the Reddit/Voat model is fundamentally flawed and it needs to be completely changed if we want to properly limit it. Realistically, the only way to fully control it is to cherrypick users though, or at least limit phuks exposure to the point where it doesn't attract tons of spammers/brigaders.
subs as pure tags
What do you mean by this?
Subs as pure tags is an idea continuing from the recent tag feature. I reasoned that a next feature request might be the ability to subscribe to a tag. The next step after, from a simplicity perspective is to merge tags and subs because they are similar concepts (each is a post feed and can be subscribed to).
The idea has problems and incompatibilities with valued features, and is a fundamentally different concept than what exists now, so I didn't bother to flesh it out further. For example, posting restrictions might be difficult to achieve, requiring a new concept for spam control (subscribe to a moderator?). With tags instead of subs, the concept of submitting to multiple topics becomes valuable, which makes posting restrictions even more difficult.
I agree that bad actors can ruin a community, there is ample evidence of that. I am not convinced that anything but a strong community can ward off bad actors. Most are deterred by bans, but for some that just makes them more determined to ruin the community. Shadowbans were invented for those people. Traditional communities protected themselves but the attitude of free speech above all has undermined their ability to do so.
If we continue with subs as communities, we need to cling to the idea that free speech is fulfilled by starting a new sub/community. The platform can provide free speech but a specific community has rules in place which protect it from trolls and other malicious actors. I like the idea of giving each user the ability to block whoever and whatever but it is not without problems. New users might see a wall of shit that the community has ignored.
How would we define participation? I like the idea of basing it on participation more than your amount of phuks taken, because you can lose the ability to downvote if you're brigaded. Then again, if we're basing it on the amount of posts/comments, its still pretty easy to get an account that can downvote.
I'm not sure what the bar should be. We don't want to make it too high and discourage new users.
I agree defining participation, or perhaps desired contributions to the community is very delicate. I would hate to see it based on crude popularity like on voat. Denying some people the right to downvote is restricting their free speech in a sense, and I hope you'll be very careful to divorce this as much as possible from the popularity of their ideology. Try basing it on the age of their account, the historical regularity (not intensity) of their site activity, the number of posts/comments with greater than 5(?) upvotes (ignoring downvotes)... there must be fairer ways.
If your first problem is too many downvotes, a more gentle step could be to limit everyone's downvote to upvote ratio. Only the heavy handed users would even notice, and the solution is directly related to the perceived problem without any other judgement of the individual involved.
I think we went down this road before. And Voat demonstrated that restrictions cause more wailing and gnashing of teeth than they prevent brigading, downvoting and other manipulation.
That was the argument on Voat about Reddit. And in current politics about immigration. Always with the assertion that landed assimilated immigrants are somehow different than the incoming ones, which are the devil and will corrupt our society.
I would prefer a move in the other direction. To give the user total control over their feed (subs as pure tags, subscribe to editor or mod, block posts by user, domain, sub). I don't know how to give each user customization over post scoring, however.