I kept my Username in the switch, I can explain how the system works as far as I've been able to tell after talking with some insiders.
Essentially you get something like 10 stirkes, the system is focused on "inorganic voting patterns" and applies retroactively to your entire account history.
What that really means is hard to say but I know I wasn't running alts and most of the people I recognized who were banned, were banned for upvoting the same guy, he was banned for downvoting some other guy and a few people in that chain of causality got unbanned for no discernible reason, The guy I upvoted a whole bunch @ed me and mentioned my posts fairly often and I liked his posts and disliked this other guys posts really consistently because the guy @ing me was beating a retard into the ground with his own words.
For clarification @s and mentions notify a user and gives them a link to follow back to the source, it seems that doing that and then voting on the other-side of that link is a sin in the admins eyes, but I never got a warning.
The thing Is plenty of people who do run alts and do exactly the same shit I just described haven't been banned because they have been ingratiating themselves with the admin.
I know this is Voat drama but the bulk of the bans that I know are erroneous involve a problem user on voat called theoldones, it looks like his entire enemies list got banned, we know he's been gas lighting the admin about us and saying we co-ordianted downvote brigades on him, in reality we use pings in the same way he did to notify one another so we could share the posts calling him out and warn others that he was beginning a new round of witch hunts and power tripping. The bans I recognize, ~7, all centered around him picking fights with users and saying retarded shit for a dozen replies and harassing users with pings and accusing them of being bots and pedos for criticizing or correcting him, obviously if someone did that to you you would downvote them whenever you saw their username for the rest of time, and it seems that condition of this purge was massaged into the admins thick skull by him.
That user makes hundreds of posts in a 24 hour period, usually saying about the same thing with just a few words changed, it seems the goal was to try to get his dissenters to hang themselves on voats retarded anti voting system.
One would think if there was going to be a rule or a banned behavior that there would be some sort of warning sticky explaining this. Kind of silly to just assume people are doing it purposely and banning outright. The drama and all the hate gets tiring. I appreciate the info.
In the modlog, it says my ban reason is:
antiliberalsociety, Type: 1
Well that user, antiliberalsociety, is the one who had recently been calling out TexasVet and I have pinged him when TV posted once or twice. He had a huge copypasta showing why TV is a dickhead.
I admit, I did downvote a lot of TV's comments and posts. Does that justify a ban without warning? Honestly didn't know I was breaking any rules
I'm betting you had 1 or 2 days where you were embroiled in TV's faggot drama, and the majority of your voat activity was supporting antiliberalsociety with upvotes and shitting on the dickhead with downvotes; apparently that's ban worthy...
Frankly it looks like all the pearl-clutchers and sycophants had their opposition banned while Putt personally waved their bans for the exact same behavior.
Honestly the majority of ny voat activity was just browsing v/all/new and up/downvoating as I saw fit. I spent maybe 5 minutes on the TV drama but even that was enough to catch a ban. Pretty gay
Bans got reversed: https://voat .co/v/Voat/3246701
Yep. Not really interested in going back though. Maybe to visit but I like poal now.
Another funny thing I realized. When Voat goes invite only and bans for vote manipulation, only people with alts can contest the bans.
Other people noticed that, I'm using my backdoor PM powers to talk to folks that I had in my PMs and it's actually making some waves I think, two mods from protect vote, another one of putt's builders, and others, Sguevar in particular made a post in protect voat protesting my ban and pinged a bunch of the users who had problems with the friday fuck-up, power users, and users close to putt, some people on alts even came out of the woodwork to bemoan the bans.
I don't presume to know if you ran alts or not but I do know that your name is the one most associated with bans, mine in particular, pretty much every one of theoldones detractors got banned for upvoting you; if I thought the ban system worked in the least I would guess that you had an alt or two and other people got swept in but I don't think for a second putt coded that system correctly considering how widespread warnings and bans were for regular users and how almost no problem users got taken out, I suspect we were all banned for upvoting you to compete with his alts and putt either likes TOO a whole lot or really fucked up the system he coded to find "inorganic activity".
Sguevar has been one of my favorite users since Madworld posted his research about suspicious news domains. It's not surprising to see him being honest and objective about the recent ban wave. I've only used one other account, game_maven, which I deleted long ago before creating Decidueye in order to prevent myself from being doxxed. While there's no doubt vote manipulation exists on Voat, the whole handling of the recent ban wave reeks. Around the time when Putt handed out the bans, he did say his first batch had errors and he rushed the fixed script out afterward. It's also hard to believe a user like Lakota_Pride, who's done nothing but positive in the Q subs, could be considered a destroyer.
I hope the remaining good users notice the fuckery from Putt's latest ban spree enabling witch hunting and make a quick exodus.
https://voat .co/v/whatever/3242309/18830860
Did you happen to downvoat putt during the aged ban drama? I think I did DV one of his posts for being overly emotional as admin, if he is reading who downvoted him and putting them on naughty lists that might explain why some users got banned without warning and others didn't.
How extremely petty that would be.
I didn't downvote his builder's post, but I definitely got on his radar after he unbanned Aged for spam in /v/gaming. I asked him to clarify the sitewide spamming rule so that it couldn't be used subjectively, that if Aged violated it again nobody would take issue with the ban, so nobody would see it as an ex post facto ban. He denied that the spamming rule was an issue and wasn't relevant to the topic at hand.
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