I'm sure there's no automated way to stop spammers and shills, but even an automated way to limit them would be preferable to manual. The problem with manual removal is it requires a judgement call. Determining what spam is would be easier, determining what a shill is would be slightly harder. We're all prone to bias. Even if janitor power isn't maliciously abused, the likelihood someone will eventually interpret shilling differently than you would seems high to me.
A good example is of Voat. It seemed like such obvious shilling to me I used AVE to flair that user so I could catch him at it again. From time to time I did see him, and he seems like a pretty normal user with pretty normal activity. I doubt he's a shill, but at the time he made that post I was pretty sure he was (and I guess a lot of others were too).
You have valid points. But a tool for us is a tool for them. If something can be automatically removed or even censored that method can be exploited, and it is on voat, I would say that’s how it became an echo chamber. So I’m cautious about any automation until I’ve seen what it can do in a test case, which is one of the things on my list to do here is setup a preview site like voat had to test ideas like this.
Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for anything like automatic removal of posts. Something more along the lines of what I originally suggested with regards to points/level based restrictions on what an account can do -- rules that apply to everyone equally, but would make it disproportionately harder to be a spammer or upvote farmer than to be a regular user. And needless to say, I'm not making any demands. This site is your baby you can do what you want.
Yeah I understand but I definitatly saw those types of restrictions used on voat as a censorship tool. It’s a complicated issue and I hope to find a good solution eventually.
That’s true, it happened to me too.
But most of these new users who joined voat did it to promote their blogs or YT channels. Once warned about the spam rules , they realized they would get their accounts and domain banned. So they started to post other stuff from different domains.
It has a positive effect on the community because they end up providing contents.
There’s a spam rule we can apply here.
Can I submit links to sites I operate?
Submitting only links to sites you operate (or are associated with), without submitting other, unrelated links, is considered spamming... If majority of the links you submit are to sites you are associated with, your domains may be globally banned from Voat. To be on the safe side, if you submit 10 links to various subverses on Voat, at most 5 of the 10 submitted links may be to the sites you are associated with.
(post is archived)