There is clearly a problem that most of the politics and news communities on Lemmy are unpleasant places to take part in discussion. People yell at each other. The tone of disagreements is that of saying what your opinion is, and insulting the other person if they don’t agree with your opinion, or a bunch of people giving quick one-off statements like “well I think it’s this way” or “no you’re wrong” which adds nothing. I’ve heard more than one person say that they simply don’t participate in politics or news communities because of it.
Well, behold:
I have made some technology which attempts to take a much heavier handed approach to moderation, by just detecting assholes or people who aren’t really contributing to the conversation, in other communities, and just banning them pre emptively en masse. In its current form, it bans about half of hexbear and lemmygrad, and almost all of the users on lemmy.world who post a nonstop stream of obnoxiously partisan content. You know the ones.
In practice it’s basically a whitelist for posting that’s easy to get on: Just don’t be a dick.
I’d like to try the experiment of having a political community with this software running the banlist, and see how it works in practice, and maybe expand it to a news community that runs the same way. There’s nothing partisan about the filtering. You can have whatever opinion you want. You just can’t be unproductive or an asshole about the way you say your opinion. And the bans aren’t permanent, they are transient based on the user’s recent past behavior.
(Edit: I think making a general news community might fit better with slrpnk than politics. In thinking about it and talking with people, I think electoral politics just doesn’t belong in the slrpnk feed, but maybe general news specifically with the political bickering that comes along with it being muted, would be a positive for the instance at the same time as I get to test out my little software project.)
I don’t want to explain in too much detail how the tech works, because I think some segment of assholes will want to evade the tech to come into the community and be assholes again. But I’d also want to set up a meta community where anyone who did get banned can ask questions or make complaints about it. (As long as that offering doesn’t turn into too much of a shit show that is.)
Is slrpnk a place where a little experiment like this could find a good home? What does everyone think of the idea?
A good number of reddit subs related to politics used very very heavy moderation to keep bots out. Many required a certain number of karma, time on reddit or similar to post on in the first place… It did not alwawys work and can lead to bubbles. Obviously so can just insulting other users. I would give it a try with some controversial memes. Something like Biden and Trump are the same. That usually gets some really bad discussions.
Setting up a community to explain bans is not needed. The mods of a community are public, so it is easy to just message them.
Yes, this is an attempt at something similar. I think the reality is that when things grow beyond a certain size you have to do some automated moderation things or else it gets overwhelming for the mods. This is an attempt at a new model for that, since I think human moderation of everything has a couple of different flaws, and some of the automated things reddit did had glaring flaws.