I made a robot moderator. It models trust flow through a network that’s made of voting patterns, and detects people and posts/comments that are accumulating a large amount of “negative trust,” so to speak.
In its current form, it is supposed to run autonomously. In practice, I have to step in and fix some of its boo-boos when it makes them, which happens sometimes but not very often.
I think it’s working well enough at this point that I’d like to experiment with a mode where it can form an assistant to an existing moderation team, instead of taking its own actions. I’m thinking about making it auto-report suspect comments, instead of autonomously deleting them. There are other modes that might be useful, but that might be a good place to start out. Is anyone interested in trying the experiment in one of your communities? I’m pretty confident that at this point it can ease moderation load without causing many problems.
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So it would delete people’s posts if they get downvoted a lot or if the poster tends to upvote heavily downvoted posts?
You’ve automated the suppression of dissenting voices.
So it would delete people’s posts if they get downvoted a lot
No.
or if the poster tends to upvote heavily downvoted posts?
No.
You’ve automated the suppression of dissenting voices.
Am not.
It’s a perfectly fair concern. I’m trying to be careful to make sure I’m not doing that. There’s quite a lot of explanation in the FAQ, and some conversations you can look back over with people who were concerned, because they’ve had experience with exactly that happening to them.
At one point I tried to illustrate with data just how big a jerk you have to be before it starts banning you. If you’re interested, I can start doing that again. Being a dissenting voice on its own is nowhere near enough to anger the bot. You can look over !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net and see quite a few dissenting voices. I’ve also offered to delve, for any user who feels that this has happened to them, into the breakdown of why they’re being ranked down, which almost always is because they’re being a jerk about their “dissenting” opinion, and not the opinion itself.
Also, I think it’s hilarious that someone coming from lemmy.ml is accusing me of trying to suppress dissenting voices. Lemmy.ml has been suppressing dissenting voices since its inception. The degree to which I’m bending over backwards not to suppress dissenting voices is something I think you should absorb and carry over to the lemmy.ml moderators as a good replacement for their current banhammer circus.
At one point I tried to illustrate with data just how big a jerk you have to be before it starts banning you. If you’re interested, I can start doing that again.
Would you?
My understanding is that downvotes reflect whether or not someone agrees with a post or comment much more than whether the user is making a constructive comment or not so they can only be used to infer how agreeable the comment is.
I’ve also offered to delve, for any user who feels that this has happened to them, into the breakdown of why they’re being ranked down, which almost always is because they’re being a jerk about their “dissenting” opinion, and not the opinion itself.
Use me as an example, I regularly get dozens of downvotes for such hot takes as “facilitating genocide hurts the dems chances of getting elected, we need them to stop that if we want them to win.”.
Hell. I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. I bet I get banned for hot takes like “I should be able to defend myself legally” and “Illegal immigrants should be deported”
You got banned for hot takes like, “A lot more pedophiles endorsing Harris though. It would cancel out if they were about the same, but they aren’t.”
I’m curious to know what you said under the posts about the Harris campaign HQ getting shot with bullets, or the disinformation project which produced the video of illegal immigrants saying they’re registered to vote, but not curious enough to look into it any further.
Sounds like the bot knows its job. The paradox of tolerance is tempting, but it’s resisting.
When was Harris shot at? Was that after Trump was shot at? Was it a copycat?
Tell you what. I can respond to this in two different ways. I really don’t agree with silencing people who have a different point of view than I do. On other platforms, I’ve spent a ton of time arguing with conservatives. So much time. It’s not unfamiliar to me. I don’t think people need to limit their interactions to only the people who are “right,” if that makes sense. It’s okay for someone to be saying something that I think is wrong, as long as they’re open to a conversation about it. I can say where I think some of your sources have a long history of deliberately misleading people, as a way of making the case that they are misleading you, too. I don’t view you as the enemy, necessarily, but I do think you’re mistaken.
If I’m going to have that conversation with me, then you don’t have to agree with me or be nice to me, but I do need you to be willing to hear me out. In exchange, I’ll promise to hear you out, too, and take seriously what you’re saying, enough to disagree with it honestly and respectfully when I disagree with it. Is that something you’re interested in? Because we have about as different a set of viewpoints as you could imagine, but I’m still fine talking with you, and having a real exchange of views.
If you don’t want to do that, and just want to emit your viewpoint and belittle other viewpoints until people remove you from the community, then I can respond to you accordingly. But I would prefer to do the first thing. I don’t think this is the forum for it, but we can surely find one, and I can spend a while talking with you about the viewpoints you seem to think are getting you censored.
Edit: Grammar
Tbh, I don’t really care to engage in arguments anymore. It never goes anywhere. It’s pretty dumb.
Sure. Here’s you. Red is downvotes, blue is upvotes. The left-right axis is time, with the past on the left.
The bar right below the red/blue bar code is the key to what comments were in what posts.
One thing that jumps out at me is that almost all of your participation is in political threads, and the majority of it is getting downvoted. It would be different if you were just participating in Lemmy, and then also you had some views that were unpopular. That happens to a lot of people, and I’ve bent over backwards trying to preserve their right to do that when I’ve been making and tuning the bot. This isn’t that. This is almost all just you going in and arguing with people.
One thing I say a lot when talking to people about this is, “It’s not your opinion, it’s your delivery.” I’m going to be honest, when I read your first message here, it annoyed me. You’re coming out of the gate hostile. Most people, when they receive that, are going to be hostile back. It’s just how people work. You’re not going to convince them of your point of view, you’re not going to be able to fine-tune your own point of view to let them poke holes in any mistakes in it. You’re just going to irritate everyone. That’s a choice you’re making in how you approach things, and I think it’s completely fair for people to react to that choice by closing the door on you.
It’s the difference between going to a party when you’re in a fringe political party, and having conversations about it, versus showing up to the party with a bunch of flyers and handing one to every person and making almost every conversation over the course of the night revolve around your chosen fringe political party. The first one is fine, or should be, at a decent party. The second one, people are going to remove you from the party for. I think if you want to make an impact on people’s thinking, you’re going to need to recognize and respect that reality of human nature.
Having an unpopular political opinion is fine. Being a little bit combative with people is fine. Doing both at once is going to collect a tidal wave of downvotes, and also I think is going to make it harder for you to make any progress convincing anyone of anything.
I regularly get dozens of downvotes for such hot takes as “facilitating genocide hurts the dems chances of getting elected, we need them to stop that if we want them to win.”.
I’m going to stop you right there.
You’re playing a little game where you claim you said one thing and got downvoted for it, when I can guarantee you actually said something different. You probably said that we need to not vote for the Democrats, because they’re facilitating genocide. That’s different. You can say that, sure. Someone might say back to you that not voting for the Democrats is going to make the genocide 20 times worse, and that’s why they’re voting for the Democrats. They can say that, too. That’s progress, that’s people talking to each other. Maybe one or the other of you will learn something from the exchange.
Where it gets difficult is where you go off into this alternate reality where they said, “I love genocide, and I love the Democrats, I’m going to give you downvotes because you don’t support genocide which I love,” and then you start arguing against that thing that they didn’t say. That’s not progress. That’s just people shouting and trying to twist the conversation around so that they can “win.” It only takes a little bit of that before people are going to stop talking to you.
I know you do that, because you did it to me in your first message in this conversation.
I looked over some of your posting history, and I think you’ve got some valuable things to say. I learned some things about how bad Liz Cheney was before she for some reason found her principles and broke with the Republican party over Trump. I saw some debates people were having with you about Russian and Chinese history, where I don’t think you’re right, but it didn’t seem like any kind of badly intentioned thing.
I think if you built up the habit of always responding honestly to what people said, and telling the truth about your own views and the world outside the best way you can, the bot wouldn’t treat you harshly, and you’d also make more progress in convincing people of what you’re trying to say.
Try again: What’s the last thing you said that got dozens of downvotes, and what did you actually say that got dozens of downvotes? What was the opposing side’s core argument, honestly summarized?
My understanding is that downvotes reflect whether or not someone agrees with a post or comment much more than whether the user is making a constructive comment or not so they can only be used to infer how agreeable the comment is.
I never responded to this part, and I should have. Yes, people definitely vote in exactly that fashion. They do, however, upvote about 10 times more than they downvote. And, the bot takes into account everything you say. It’s not just those controversial topics. You have to be talking about only, or majority, things that people don’t want to hear in order to trigger it. And, Lemmy is all those minority political takes on things. There are a lot of communities where you’ll get straight-up banned for saying things that are mainstream American points of view. The people who tend to be argumentative like to maintain a fiction that people on Lemmy just can’t handle someone who’s anti-genocide, or something like that, when they’re showing up right next to a “fuck Israel” meme or a “fuck Biden for arming Israel” meme that has 1,500 upvotes.
It’s hard for me to make a convincing argument that it’s tolerant of dissenting voices who aren’t jerks about it without listing off accounts. I can do some version, though, if you’re interested, listing examples of banned and not-banned accounts to illustrate where the boundary line is.
Lemmy just can’t handle someone who’s anti-genocide
They can’t when that stance conflicts with their party. Hence why “The dems need to stop the genocide, people are not going to vote for genocide” gets you downvoted.
“fuck Biden for arming Israel” meme that has 1,500 upvotes
Those exist on .world? I see too many “You have to vote for genocide because trump would do genocide and also other bad things” type posts, it’d be weird if they coexisted.
can do some version, though, if you’re interested
Sure if it’s trivial I’d be interested, but don’t put too much work into it.
I don’t know how much I want to go around this merry-go-round. I’m losing some of my good humor about it. I’ll try though.
If you need evidence, here it is:
https://lemmy.world/search?q=fuck+biden&type=All&listingType=All&communityId=1384&page=1&sort=TopAll
Let’s look at the first page:
Fuck Biden and fuck Putin.
(Even though I did vote for Biden in 2020 and plan to again in 2024 if he’s the Democratic nominee.)
118 upvotes (inb4 you pretend that the other three also included that little disclaimer, even though they didn’t)
Also genocide. Never forget that Biden is aiding and abetting a genocide. Don’t fucking look away because he’s your guy, motherfuckers
81 upvotes
Obligatory: Fuck Biden, Fuck Putin, Fuck Netanyahu/IDF and anybody else complicit in killing innocent people and/or oppressing people.
51 upvotes
Broadly, Biden supporting this genocide in the way that he has is costing him the election. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean you support Trump. Arguing that if you don’t support Biden in-spite of this position is headspinning, and some posters here (@PugJesus@lemmy.world ) are doing the work of trying to separate the left from Democrats in this regard.
49 upvotes
Expressing the viewpoint that you are claiming is banned, is incredibly popular.
You said, “They can’t when that stance conflicts with their party.” That’s backwards. I can’t speak for everybody, but for me, it’s exactly the other way around. Because I dislike genocide, and because Trump getting elected will accelerate the genocide tenfold, I support Harris. I’m not clinging to the Democrats even though they’re enabling genocide. I’m voting Democratic in this election because the alternative is more genocide. Much, much more.
You can understand and deal with that viewpoint head-on without caricaturing it into something else. You could say it doesn’t make sense, you could criticize the logic, you could try to argue some other strategy that is no genocide, instead of Harris or Trump. All fine. Instead you’re doing a little dodge where you pretend that the only reason someone might say that, is that they love Democrats and are okay with genocide. For as long as that’s your debate style, you are not welcome, as far as I’m concerned. Learn to respect the point of view of people you disagree with, if you like. I think it’ll help you. Or don’t, and get used to being not listened to in some forums, and banned from some others.
You can take that or leave it. I’m not trying to debate you. But I’m now pointing out for the second time that, rather than the issue being your viewpoint, which is popular on Lemmy, the issue is that you are caricaturing your opponent’s also-popular viewpoint on Lemmy into something nutty, so that you can send messages which have no possible possibility of any productive impact. That’s disrespectful and inflammatory. That’s why you are banned. Not because of your viewpoint, which is very popular on Lemmy.
I must say I don’t like the idea of a social-credit-score bot.
Regarding your implementation, I saw the summary of your own comments elsewhere in this post and I noticed all the annotations were on upvoted/blue segments. Other summaries you posted focused more on negative/red segments. Would it be possible to enforce a minimum of 1 or 2 from both categories?
Also, would you be kind enough to read my tea leaves? Am I an acceptable citizen of the Lemmy community?
I’m in agreement. The social credit idea really doesn’t bode well. Karma resrictions on Reddit are one of the bad parts of Reddit and I for one am glad that it’s not a thing here.
You’re fine. Why would you not be? You left 15 comments in the last month, and they were all upvoted. It doesn’t even really have much to go on to rank you, but your rank is positive, nowhere near 0, much less far enough into the negative side that it would need to be to even be greylisted.
99% of Lemmy is made of acceptable citizens. That’s a real number. Only 1% of the users that it evaluates, which is itself only a tiny fraction of the total Lemmy population, ever get blacklisted. You have to be very obnoxious before it starts targeting you. I can understand the worry that this is going to arbitrarily start attacking people because of some vague AI bot decision, but that’s not what is happening.
The visualization of someone’s social credit score just picks the 5 most impactful posts, it doesn’t discriminate based on positive or negative. If you want to see what the red corresponds to on my graph, the most negative things I have done within the time window are:
They both contributed some red to the graph, I think. The red at the far right end is comments within this post that people are taking exception to.
Finally, what the Fediverse needed:
AIs.
Good to know they’ve caught up to us from the walled gardens. Welp, I guess that’s it folks. Let’s pack up and go back to Usenet.
The core algorithm, a robust way to determine global trust rankings based on a network of relative trust, was first codified and used for this purpose in the late 1800s. It would be difficult to come up with a way to attack this problem that is further separated from the era of AI algorithms. I think you would need help from a math historian.
(edit: I accidentally a word and didn’t realize you wrote ‘auto-report instead of deleting them’. Read the following with a grain of salt)
I’ve played (briefly) with automated moderation bots on forums, and the main thing stopping me from going much past known-bad profiles (e.g. visited the site from a literal spamlist) is not just false positives but malicious abuse. I wanted to add a feature which would censor an image immediately with a warning if it was reported for (say) porn, shock imagery or other extreme content, but if a user noticed this, they could falsely report content to censor it until a staff member dismisses the report.
Could an external brigade of trolls get legitimate users banned or their posts hidden just by gaming your bot? That’s a serious issue which could make real users have their work deleted, and in my experience, users can take that very personally.
It’s possible. I think it’s more difficult than people think. You have to do it on a scale which is blatantly obvious to anyone who’s looking, so you’re just inviting a ban.
One person swore to me that it would be really easy, so I invited them to try, and they made a gang of bots which farmed karma and then mass-downvoted me, trying to get me banned from my own place. If you look at my profile you’ll see some things which have -300 score because of it. I welcomed the effort, since I’m interested in how well it will resist that kind of attack. Their first effort did exactly nothing, because none of the downvote bots had any rank within the algorithm. I gave them some pointers on how they could improve for a second time around, and they went radio silent and I haven’t heard from them since then.
