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.
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.