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.
Really cool idea! I agree on the whole most people are incredibly nice and will go out of their way to explain their reasoning. But a small, loud group seems to crop up in political discussions. It’s interesting because it’s not always they they don’t know they’re being rude, but rather they know and are proud of it because of their beliefs.
It was remarkable, when I started looking at it, how small the population of users is that seem to be causing almost all of the problems. It was also remarkable how little the existing moderation approach is doing to rein them in.