Meta (slrpnk.net)

I know, I was just trying to give a frame of reference for what the level of ban-worthiness would be.

So you're okay if I try this experiment? Looking now at how it might play out, I admit I'm having second thoughts about whether it's even a good fit for this instance. Maybe something would be better like "pleasant news," where people can post news stories even about political or geopolitical topics, but the actors who like to turn the comments into a war zone are removed to a much lower level. Tell me what you think, though, and I also want to think about it a little bit more.

Perfectly reasonable. It's not feeding any users' comments into any LLM public API like OpenAI that might use them for training the model in the future. As a matter of face it's not communicating with any API or web service, just self contained on the machine that runs it.

As far as transparency, I completely get it. I would hope that the offer to point to specific reasons for any user that wants to ask questions about why they can't post will help to alleviate that, but it won't make it completely go away. Especially because as I said, I'm expecting that it will get its decisions wrong some small percentage of the time. I just know there's an arms race between moderation tooling and people trying to get around the moderation tooling, and I don't want to give the bad actors any legs up in that competition even if there are very valid reasons for it in terms of giving people reasons to trust that the system is honest.

Other things that have occurred to me in the meantime:

1. I'm fine with explaining how it works to one of the slrpnk admins in confidence. We can get in Matrix, I can show the code and some explanation, and depending on how it goes I might even be fine giving access to the same introspection tools I use, to examine in detail going forward why it made some particular decision and if it's on the right track. The point is not that I'm the only one who's allowed to understand it, just that I don't want it to become common knowledge.
2. I'm not excited to be a "full time" moderator, for reasons of time investment and responsibility level. Just like with [email protected], I want to be able to create this community because I think it is important, not necessarily to "run it" so to speak. My preferred perfect trajectory in the long run is that it becomes a tool that people can use to automate moderation for their own communities, if it can prove useful, instead of just being used by me to run my own little empire. I just happen to think that this type of bad-actor-resistant political community would be a great thing on its own, as well as a good test of this automated approach to moderation of communities political and otherwise.

You are not banned. The number of users from slrpnk that are banned is very small.

"Ban" is not quite the right word, since it's always flexible to current behavior. Maybe that is me trying to whitewash my self propaganda about how good an idea it is, but I pictured it more as this model: Whatever user in question has not met the bar of productive discussion to be let in, at the present time.

Maybe the bot should be called elitistbot.

And yes, if you are being racist or something, the bot is not needed and the mods and admins would give you an actual ban of the permanent kind. This is about detecting misbehavior at a more subtle and forgivable level than that, and reacting to it with a more temporary action.

My vision is that if some person is unable to post, and wants to post asking why, I can give them some sort of answer (similar to what I said to Alice in another message here). The ban decision is never permanent, either, it's just based on the user's recent and overall posting history. If you want to be on the whitelist, there's specific guidance on what you "did wrong" so to speak, and if you decide the whole thing is some mod overreach one viewpoint whitewash and you want no part of it, that's okay too. My hope is that it winds up being a pleasant place to discuss politics without being oppressive to anyone's freedom of speech or coming across as arbitrary or bad, but that is why I want to try the experiment. Maybe the bot in practice turns out to be a capricious asshole and people decide that it (and me) are not worth dealing with.

The whole model is more of a private club model (we'll let you in but you have to be nice), different from the current moderation model. The current implementation would want to exclude about 200 users altogether. Most are from lemmy.world or lemmy.ml (And 3 from slrpnk. I haven't investigated what those people did that it didn't like.)

Specific answers to your questions:

1. Only after. The scale means it would be unworkable to try to talk to every single person before. Transparency of talking to people after, if they wanted to post and found out they couldn't, I think is an important part.
2. I think necessarily yes. I envision a community which is specifically for ban complaints and explanations for people who want them, although maybe that would develop as a big time sink and anger magnet. I would hope that after a while people have trust that it's not just me secretly making a list of people I don't like, or something, and then that type of thing would quiet down, but in the beginning it has to be that way for there to be any level of trust, if I'm trying to keep the algorithm a secret.
3. It's a fair question. Explaining how the current model works exposes some ways to game the system and post some obnoxious content without the bot keeping you out. But, I like the current model's performance at this difficult task. So I want to keep the way it works now and keep it secret. I realize that's unsatisfying of course. I'm not categorically opposed to the idea of publishing the whole details, even making it open source, so people can have transparency, and then if people are putting in the effort to dodge around it then we deal with that as it comes.
4. None.
5. Not at all.

I thought about calling the bot "unfairbot", just to prime people for the idea that it's going to make unfair decisions sometimes. Part of the idea is that because it's not a person making personal decisions, it can be much more heavy handed at tone policing than any human moderator could be without being a total raging oppressive jerk.

Yes, this is an attempt at something similar. I think the reality is that when things grow beyond a certain size you have to do some automated moderation things or else it gets overwhelming for the mods. This is an attempt at a new model for that, since I think human moderation of everything has a couple of different flaws, and some of the automated things reddit did had glaring flaws.

Sure. I'll take some time for a detailed answer:

Question One: I already said; it's nothing to do with the user's politics. What you're saying about the flaws in the normal moderation model, I agree with. In practice I have seen political moderation boil down to "you better be leftist or we'll ban you," or else "anything goes unless you're crossing certain way-too-loose boundaries, but if you just make the conversation unpleasant for everyone, that's fine." That's exactly why I would like to try a third way that works by a different model.

I just checked, and you would be banned. Not for anything political, but for things like this and this. Maybe I shouldn't have brought the word "asshole" into it, because neither of those comments is any kind of asshole thing. But the point is, there's a high bar. If you came in saying "Karl Marx is wrong and here is why" or the same for Biden or Trump or Bernie Sanders, or Swedish politicians, I think you'd be fine.

Your comment about how Sweden should ban rape first is really a perfect example of what this is specifically intended to pick up on. It deciding that means you're not allowed to post, is it working as I intended. Whether that is a feature or a bug depends on individual viewpoint of course.

Question Two: Yes, it should be very clear what's going on. The whole point of the community is to offer this moderation model for people who want to be in that community. But like I say, think of it more like a whitelist. You don't really have to do anything "wrong" for it to not let you in.

If there's a way to set the CSS so people have a warning about what's going on, also, that sounds good to me.

Question Three: The Lemmy political communities are maybe one third people talking about politics, and two thirds people yelling opinions at each other with no interest in hearing what the other person is saying, no interest in explaining why they hold their viewpoints, just barking "this way this way" in discord with each other, and it makes it unpleasant.

Look at this thread for a good example.

• Top level comment with a little bit of explanation, fine
• Reply with a pretty inflammatory response with 0 explanation and no follow-up when the person asks questions. What a bunch of crap.
• Top level comment with detailed argument for, basically, the same thing Linkerbaan's reply said, but with a lot of argument in favor. Fine.

To me, the first and last ones would be influential to a "don't ban" decision, and the middle one would be influential to a "ban" decision.

I'm not saying that's how the technology would see it, but you asked me how I would like the conversation to look. If it was the first guy and the third guy disagreeing with each other but explaining why and going into some detailed back and forth about it, and little inflammatory opinion-bombs like the second one weren't allowed, I think that would help things be less painful.

Hope this explanation and answer is helpful.