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.

[email protected] 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.

Pleasant Politics

[email protected]

  • auk@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    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.