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.
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.
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.