Every political thread is chock full of people being angry and unreasonable. I did some data mining, and most of the hate is coming from a very small percentage of the community, and the rest of the community is very consistent in downvoting them.
The problem is that even with human moderators enforcing a series of rules, most of those people are still in the comments making things miserable. So I made a bot to do it instead.
!santabot@slrpnk.net is a bot that uses an algorithm similar to PageRank to analyze the Lemmy community, and preemptively bans about 1-2% of posters, that consistently get a negative reaction a lot of the time. Take a look at an example of the early results. See how nice that is? It’s just people talking, and when they disagree, they say things like “clearly that part is wrong” and “your additions are good information though.”
It’s too early to tell how well it will work on a larger scale, but I’m hopeful. So, welcome to my experiment. Let’s talk politics without all the abusive people coming into the picture too. Please come in and test if this thing can work in the long run.
I’m not interested in being polite to people who want to take away rights, promote discrimination, and try to overthrow elections.
The idea sounds great in theory, but seems like a bad idea with the massive rise in fascism.
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.
Then that defeats the purpose of your community dude.
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. Isn’t there already enough of that here ? How is that any different from what’s already going on in the political communities?
Who is anyone to say who’s a fascist and who isn’t?
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”
I mean, honestly, if you want to be real, (which I doubt you are gonna be)
Sorry, I’m not saying that to be an asshole, but you should be fair and equal to both sides, and you’re not.
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?
Its not productive or educational, it’s just a bunch of politically obsessed, angry People, throwing fits because somebody said that they’re a this or a that and don’t agree with their politics.
You guys really need to just stop bullshitting and just be honest with what your true intentions are.
Anybody who’s worth a dam, who could add anything of value to this community doesn’t want to waste their time with shit like this.
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.
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.
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.
Huh? I’m an adult, I can handle someone being rude. That’s no issue.
Lol
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for respect and civility, but discussing politics is so… dull. Can’t we talk about something juicier? Like the latest fashion trends or which celebrity is serving looks on the red carpet? You know I’m all about spreading love and positivity, but save the politics for someone else, darling! Now, tell me, have you seen the newest collection from Versace?