• 13 Posts
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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • I made this system because I, also, was concerned about the macro social implications.

    Right now, the model in most communities is banning people with unpopular political opinions or who are uncivil. Anyone else can come in and do whatever they like, even if a big majority of the community has decided they’re doing more harm than good. Furthermore, when certain things get too unpleasant to deal with on any level anymore, big instances will defederate from each other completely. The macro social implications of that on the community are exactly why I want to try a different model, because that one doesn’t seem very good.

    You seem to be convinced ahead of time that this system is going to censor opposing views, ignoring everything I’ve done to address the concern and indicate that it is a valid concern. Your concern is noted. If you see it censoring any opposing views, please let me know, because I don’t want it to do that either.


  • It’s difficult. A downvote from an account with no history does nothing. Your bot has to post a lot of content first to attract upvotes from genuine accounts. Then once you’ve accumulated some rank, you can start giving upvotes or downvotes in bulk to the accounts you want to manipulate. It’s impossible to completely prevent that, but you have to do it a lot to have an impact.

    I think this model is more resistant to trickery than it would seem, but it’s not completely resistant. I do expect some amount of trickery that will then need counter-trickery. On the other hand, the problem of tricking the system also exists in the current moderation model. You don’t have to outwit the system to get your content posted or ban your enemy if it’s trivial to flood the comment section with your content from alt accounts and drown them out instead. I don’t know for sure that something like that is happening, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that was one reason why there are so many obnoxiously vocal people.


  • You’re not banned or even close to it. The ban list is surprisingly lenient in terms of people’s differing political views. You have to habitually make enemies of a lot of the people in the comments, one way or another, with a big fraction of what you post. Most people don’t do that, wherever on the political spectrum they might fall.

    Whether that’s a good idea or not remains to be seen. I had some surprises today.





  • I looked at the bot’s judgements about your user. The issue isn’t your politics. Anti-center or anti-Western politics are the majority view on Lemmy, and your posts about your political views get ranked positively. The problem is that somehow you wind up in long heated arguments with “centrists” which wander away from the topic and get personal, where you double down on bad behavior because you say that’s the tactic you want to employ to get your point across. That’s the content that’s getting ranked negatively, and often enough to overcome the weight of the positive content.

    If Lemmy split into a silo that was the 98.6% of users that didn’t do that, and a silo of 1.4% of users that wanted to do that, I would be okay with that outcome. I completely agree with your concern in the abstract, but that’s not what’s happening here.



  • I’ve already declined two reports requesting that I take moderator action against content that’s people directly going out into their community and helping get things done, because that is “not politics.” People definitely seem to want their mods to be vigorously engaged in enforcing the boundaries on the stuff people are allowed to say.

    As far as my take on it, we can have overlap between the peasant politics and the pleasant politics. The community was for the latter, but the former sounds great, too.



  • I know exactly what you mean. If I had to pick one type of comment that the bot is designed to ban for, those are them. It turns out to be pretty easy to do, too, because the community usually downvotes those comments very severely, even if the current moderation rules allow them even when someone does them 20 times a day.

    Pick a name of someone you’ve seen do that, search the modlog on slrpnk.net, and I think you will find them banned by Santa. And, if they’re not, DM me their username, because there might be some corner case in the parameter tuning that I have missed.


  • I was kind of like rooting for you, but it just seems like from what you said here that you’re only gonna allow people to be rude to whatever party. It is that the majority people on Lemmy don’t like.

    You’re absolutely right to worry about this. This was one of my biggest concerns when I was setting it up. Lemmy already has a definite community vibe and consensus opinions to go with it, and I think censoring the “opposition” opinion is one of the quickest routes to turning any political community into a useless circle-jerk. Most lemmy.ml communities are like that.

    My goal was to set the parameters broadly enough that people who disagree with the community are allowed to say whatever they want, but still strict enough that people who are outright jerks in any big fraction of their comments get removed. The current tuning bans about 1.4% of the community. You’re still not banned. I don’t think limiting it to 98.6% of the community will create too much of a circlejerk. There’s only one user that I’m aware of that is banned, for which I disagree with the ban, and I talked to them for a while, and sent them some detailed examples of what the bot concluded about their posting. I concluded by saying that while I disagree with silencing them, I think amending the way they present their posts will help the bot’s conclusions about them, and also for the same reason get their point across more effectively to any person who’s reading them. The huge amount of downvotes they’re getting doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong, but it does mean most people are putting them in that bottom 1.4%, which is a problem if they want to convince anyone or accomplish anything.

    It helps that I sympathize with some viewpoints that are unpopular, so I get it if someone wants to have the right to speak their mind without some person looking over their shoulder deciding if they’re allowed to, or if they’re being civil enough about each individual comment. You’re right. That’s ridiculous.

    You’re just going to take their word for it, as if they’re some certified expert and shit? “I don’t like what you said, therefore i deem you a this or a that”

    Absolutely not. Part of what came through over and over again while I was tuning the bot, and looking over mod decisions to contrast with it, was that a lot of times the moderators are coming in and making snap judgements that are far less complete and accurate than can be gotten from looking at what the whole community consensus thinks is a problem.

    You’re doing exactly what Lemmy is already doing.

    Why is it that some of you moderators and admins can’t just be equal without letting your feelings dictate who is right and who is wrong?

    Assess both sides under the SAME scrutiny, even if you don’t like something. I mean, really who, even wants to be a part of a discussion like this?

    This is the algorithm. It’s not going to be clear what it’s doing, since it’s not commented well and it would be complicated to understand even if it were, but surely you can see that there is no “if my_llm_thinks_is_fascist:” block in it or anything.

    Like I said, you’re not banned, as of the current parameters. Part of the idea is to give people the freedom to come in and say what they want, instead of having an overworked mod decide by hand on the spot what is disinformation, what is incivility, what sources are reliable and not, important and not trivial decisions like that. I don’t know how to duplicate for you the time I spent looking over what the conversations really look like, how to draw the line so that the people everyone thinks are clearly bad actors are removed, but the people who are simply unpopular or have a minority opinion are welcome, but that’s what I tried to do.

    One way to cut to the chase: Just try it. Come in, say some political opinions, see if it works. The bans are mostly static based on past behavior, so as long as you’re not posting porn or KKK flyers or something, I think you’ll be fine.

    If it’s something outside the realm of politics I will probably moderate it by hand. I’m not trying to offer a blanket “free speech safe space” for racism or anything else that anyone feels like posting. Sorry. If you want that, you can go to Twitter. It’s up to you of course, but I think that this is a step closer to what you’re saying here that you want, not a step away from it.



  • I completely agree with you on that. “Pleasant” might have been a misleading way for me to frame the community. As far as the bot is concerned, you’re free to be as unfriendly to fascists as you want.

    As a matter of fact, part of what I think is wrong with the current moderation model is the emphasis on “civility.” I think you should be allowed to be unfriendly.

    I’ll give an example: I spent some time talking with existing moderators as I was tweaking and testing the bot, and we got in a discussion about two specific users. One of them, the bot was banning, and the other it wasn’t. The moderator I was talking with pointed it out and said that my bot was getting it backwards, because the one user was fine, and the other user was getting in arguments and drawing a lot of user reports. I looked at what was going on, and pointed out that the first user was posting some disingenuous claims that were drawing tons of hate and disagreement from almost the entire rest of the community, that would start big arguments that didn’t go anywhere. The second user was being rude sometimes, but it was a small issue from the point of view of the rest of the community, and usually I think the people they were being rude to were in the wrong anyway.

    The current moderation model leaves the first user alone, even if they want to post their disingenuous stuff ten times a day, and dings the second user because they are “uncivil.” I think that’s backwards. Of course if someone’s being hostile to everyone, that’s a problem, but I think a lot of bad behavior that makes politics communities bad doesn’t fit the existing categories for moderation very well, and relying on volunteer moderators who are short on time to make snap judgements about individual users and comments is not a good approach to applying the rules even as they are.

    So come in and be impolite to the fascists. Go nuts. You don’t have to be pleasant in that sense. In fact, I think you’ll probably have more freedom to do that here than in other communities.




  • I made !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net for this exact reason. I wouldn’t describe the influx of shit opinions as exclusively conservative, but it’s definitely an influx, and it definitely requires some type of different reaction than the four unsatisfying horsemen of blocking, defederating, replying to each one until your fingers start to hurt, or seething silently. And every so often having a moderator delete one explicitly racist comment isn’t the answer.

    The model I am trying to make is that if you’re consistently getting downvotes from trusted members of the community, out you go. The theory is that that will make the whole thing less excruciating. You can look more about it at !santabot@slrpnk.net. I don’t know if it it going to work. But something must be done.

    Edit: Fixed the link. There is no Pleastant Politics.


  • I would suggest that what is to you “correcting misinformation” can easily be received as just being cantankerous or offensive.

    If you accept that the other person has a choice whether or not to agree with what you are saying, and show respect for both their ability to make up their own mind about it and the possibility that you might be the wrong one, I think you will be more successful at correcting the misinformation. As it is, I think you’re gathering a lot of downvotes because you’re airing deliberately combative opinions in places they aren’t welcome, and often not much more than that.

    I think a better solution would be to find a way to present your opinion in a way that still preserves the health of the community as you say, and stay, rather than to either hold on to your current way or else go. I didn’t read your entire profile, just that parts of it that the bot took issue with, but even those, I agreed with your unpopular opinion a lot of the time. But I do think the bot has a point that you’re creating your own unwelcome reception by the way that you are presenting them.


  • Sure. Here are some offending comments that it picked out:

    They’re unpopular in a way that motivates a ban decision, with the last two being severely unpopular.

    I think I agree with your first two comments, so it irritates me a lot that they’re motivating a ban. That’s exactly the kind of silencing of an unpopular viewpoint that I don’t want it to do. Your last comment is different. I’ll just say that a lot of what I want to do is look at the type of discussion that particular comments cause, and in this case that last comment definitely caused a lot of yelling and not a lot of evidence-based reasoned discussion from either side.

    The reason the determination changed is that I retuned the bot such that it’s a lot easier to get banned if stuff like those comments above is all, or most, of what you post. And it does look a lot like that applies to you. Even if any one comment isn’t a deal-breaker, most of your comments are like the above, so you’re starting to look like a rabble-rouser primarily, and a political participant calmly speaking your mind only occasionally. It’s not that any one of the comments is a deal breaker, but that stuff is the majority of what you post.

    I’m not sure how to feel about it. When I looked over the whole history I did see quite a lot of controversy which usually isn’t good. But it’s hard for me to say that I agree with the bot’s determination in this case, especially because a good bit of what you say, I agree with.