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So its been an interesting week for me, lots of new users and a few new problems to deal with. I believe we have come up with an effective solution for the problem. Thank you to all who suggested it.

In the spirit of maintaining Poal's integrity as a truly free speech platform, we are going to implement a blocking feature to give the individual users the choice to block whom they wish. Instead of us as the admins deciding for everyone who gets to speak to whom(it will be expandable) Admins' role is to make sure the site is running and handle people who break the ToS. Anything else should be left to users to decide. (assuming they have the right tools)

That being said in the mean time we have some problem users that have been generally assholes to everyone here on the site. I've got to do something as they are discouraging people from speaking. So until the feature is implemented these accounts and if you want specifics I'm happy to give them but I'm guessing everyone already knows who I'm talking about will be disabled.

It really sucks that a feature like this even needs to exist but it apparently does.

I don't want to see this site go the way of other similar platforms. So this is how we are going to try and prevent that.

So its been an interesting week for me, lots of new users and a few new problems to deal with. I believe we have come up with an effective solution for the problem. Thank you to all who suggested it. In the spirit of maintaining Poal's integrity as a truly free speech platform, we are going to implement a blocking feature to give the individual users the choice to block whom they wish. Instead of us as the admins deciding for everyone who gets to speak to whom(it will be expandable) Admins' role is to make sure the site is running and handle people who break the ToS. Anything else should be left to users to decide. (assuming they have the right tools) That being said in the mean time we have some problem users that have been generally assholes to everyone here on the site. I've got to do something as they are discouraging people from speaking. So until the feature is implemented these accounts and if you want specifics I'm happy to give them but I'm guessing everyone already knows who I'm talking about will be disabled. It really sucks that a feature like this even needs to exist but it apparently does. I don't want to see this site go the way of other similar platforms. So this is how we are going to try and prevent that.

(post is archived)

[–] 7 pts

I recall Putt saying the state of Voat wasn't what he had envisioned for a free speech platform and proposing alternatives to severe rate limiting of new accounts, but it's been some time and as far as I know the proposed changes were never implemented. I do think that's been a major contribution to the deterioration of Voat's quality. I did see some newcomers trying to reasonably contribute their perspective, who were down-voted to restricted status just because their perspective was unpopular. The people wanting to discuss (discuss, not just berate those they disagree with) differences of opinion seem to me the most important for a free speech forum.

When the climate becomes hostile enough to different views, you lose the main rewards of free speech, such as the free exchange of ideas and the ability to learn things that inconvenience or threaten the establishment. Some balance has to be met to prevent a critical level of harassment from driving off contributing members, vs censoring for merely being too unpopular.