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.

!santabot@slrpnk.net

  • auk@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
    0·
    17 days ago

    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.