I added an explanation of the details of how it works to the source file that implements the main rank algorithm. The math behind it is not simple, but it’s also not rocket science, if you have some data science abilities and want to check it out.

I’ve already declined two reports requesting that I take moderator action against content that’s people directly going out into their community and helping get things done, because that is “not politics.” People definitely seem to want their mods to be vigorously engaged in enforcing the boundaries on the stuff people are allowed to say.

As far as my take on it, we can have overlap between the peasant politics and the pleasant politics. The community was for the latter, but the former sounds great, too.

It was remarkable, when I started looking at it, how small the population of users is that seem to be causing almost all of the problems. It was also remarkable how little the existing moderation approach is doing to rein them in.

Don’t let the python fool you. It is not simple python. I’ll try to add some comments later on to make it more clear what’s going on.

For tuning parameters, it was complicated. Mostly, I did spot-checks on random users at different ranking levels, to try to check that the boundary for banning matched up pretty well with what I thought was the boundary of an acceptable level of jerkishness. That, combined with deeper dives into which comments had made what contributions to the user’s overall rankings. And then talking with existing moderators, looking over the banlists, and bringing up users where they thought the bot was getting it wrong. There were a lot of corner cases and fixes to the parameters to fix the corner cases. Sometimes it was increasing SMOOTHING_FACTOR to make users more equal in rank with each other, when we found some user that was banned because of one bad interaction with some high-rank person who downvoted them. Sometimes it was changing parameters to change how easy it is to overcome a few negatively-ranked postings by being generally positive with the rest of your postings. There are always users for which the right answer is a matter for debate or opinion, but as long as the bot isn’t making decisions that are clearly wrong, I think it’s doing pretty well.

You can look over some places where I talked with people about the bot’s opinion of their user, in this post and this post. I don’t want to publicly do those breakdowns for people who haven’t agreed to have it done to them, but that might give you an idea of how the tuning went. What I did to tune the parameters was the same type of thing as I showed in those comments, just a whole lot more of it.

I know exactly what you mean. If I had to pick one type of comment that the bot is designed to ban for, those are them. It turns out to be pretty easy to do, too, because the community usually downvotes those comments very severely, even if the current moderation rules allow them even when someone does them 20 times a day.

Pick a name of someone you’ve seen do that, search the modlog on slrpnk.net, and I think you will find them banned by Santa. And, if they’re not, DM me their username, because there might be some corner case in the parameter tuning that I have missed.

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.

The code for the bot is open source. It’s not an AI model. It’s based on a classical technique for analyzing networks of relative trust and turning them into a master list of community trust, combined with a lot of studying its output and tweaking parameters. The documentation is sparse, but if someone is skilled in these things they can probably take a few hours to study it and its conclusions and see what’s going on.

If you’re interested in looking at it for real, I can write some better documentation for the algorithm parts, which will probably be necessary to make sense of it beyond the surface level.

I completely agree with you on that. “Pleasant” might have been a misleading way for me to frame the community. As far as the bot is concerned, you’re free to be as unfriendly to fascists as you want.

As a matter of fact, part of what I think is wrong with the current moderation model is the emphasis on “civility.” I think you should be allowed to be unfriendly.

I’ll give an example: I spent some time talking with existing moderators as I was tweaking and testing the bot, and we got in a discussion about two specific users. One of them, the bot was banning, and the other it wasn’t. The moderator I was talking with pointed it out and said that my bot was getting it backwards, because the one user was fine, and the other user was getting in arguments and drawing a lot of user reports. I looked at what was going on, and pointed out that the first user was posting some disingenuous claims that were drawing tons of hate and disagreement from almost the entire rest of the community, that would start big arguments that didn’t go anywhere. The second user was being rude sometimes, but it was a small issue from the point of view of the rest of the community, and usually I think the people they were being rude to were in the wrong anyway.

The current moderation model leaves the first user alone, even if they want to post their disingenuous stuff ten times a day, and dings the second user because they are “uncivil.” I think that’s backwards. Of course if someone’s being hostile to everyone, that’s a problem, but I think a lot of bad behavior that makes politics communities bad doesn’t fit the existing categories for moderation very well, and relying on volunteer moderators who are short on time to make snap judgements about individual users and comments is not a good approach to applying the rules even as they are.

So come in and be impolite to the fascists. Go nuts. You don’t have to be pleasant in that sense. In fact, I think you’ll probably have more freedom to do that here than in other communities.

Fixed, thank you.

I made !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net for this exact reason. I wouldn’t describe the influx of shit opinions as exclusively conservative, but it’s definitely an influx, and it definitely requires some type of different reaction than the four unsatisfying horsemen of blocking, defederating, replying to each one until your fingers start to hurt, or seething silently. And every so often having a moderator delete one explicitly racist comment isn’t the answer.

The model I am trying to make is that if you’re consistently getting downvotes from trusted members of the community, out you go. The theory is that that will make the whole thing less excruciating. You can look more about it at !santabot@slrpnk.net. I don’t know if it it going to work. But something must be done.

Edit: Fixed the link. There is no Pleastant Politics.

Not that the line starting to go down would represent positive progress on climate change. It would mean only less new damage with every passing year, a smaller progress in worsening the catastrophe that’s already well in motion. But the fact that the line isn’t even going down illustrates the catastrophic absurdity of claiming that we’re making tangible progress with existing policies.

The home we all live is on fire, and we’re still lighting new blazes, while congratulating ourselves that we’re meeting our targets.

I had this exact same question and it led to me starting !inperson@slrpnk.net / !inperson@slrpnk.net as an attempt at a solution. It’s already pointed me to a few good ones.

There are also some pretty fantastic ideas in this thread, which I plan to post as new threads there.

:-D

I expected Biden to be pretty bad, just because he’s a rich white guy who’s been in politics all his life and the Democrats are usually pretty bad. I voted for him originally mainly just because he wouldn’t try to kill all the Mexicans or re-invade Vietnam or put trans people in prison or whatever like Trump would, basically your point of view in this message.

He surprised me. I couldn’t see Hilary Clinton forgiving student loan debt or pausing LNG exports or making these pitifully small sanctions on a pitifully small number of Israelis which is still better than most US presidents’ “here’s some more patriot missiles and rockets God bless your killing” approach to Israel. He’s still pretty far from what I would like to have, but I expected pure bullshit and he’s better than average. You’re not required to agree, but that’s how I see it.

Fun stuff.

Yes, Trump will absolutely threaten trans people’s safety in addition to being far more encouraging than Biden is with massacring Arabs. That’s not “using as a shield,” that’s just what’s up. Of course you already know this.

What if Bernie Sanders might get elected in the primary, but I decide there’s an element of his platform that I don’t like, and I stay home in protest instead of voting, and Biden wins the primary instead? Am I, then, a selfish piece of shit?

I feel like I just asked you this: Are you under the impression that I somehow have the ability to choose who wins the primaries?

I have one vote and you have one vote. My ability to affect the primaries is equal to yours. There are systems of media that conspire to make it tough for a person other than pro-corporate trash to win the primaries, but why are you talking to me like that’s my fault? And why are you saying that if the wrong person wins, then staying home to put in office an even worse person is going to help solve the problem?

I appreciate it. You are welcome to reuse it, if you like it. I’m just pissed off at the absolute self-defeating absurdity of these arguments and how self-righteously these people are screeching them. Welcome to the internet, I guess.

Stop electing pro-corporate trash in the primaries.

Are you under the impression that somehow I have the ability to elect different people in the primaries, and I’m just choosing not to?

The motive is unclear

Not to me it isn’t.

I agree with a lot of this, yes. DC is a very weird place and most of our politicians are old as hell. I think a lot of them remember the lessons of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter a lot more clearly than they remember the lessons of Bernie Sanders. Plus, a lot of them are corrupted by the lure of corporate cash, and they turned their backs on the American people. It’s a hell of a shame. I agree.

Letting Trump get elected and pour gasoline all over the whole edifice and throw anyone who’s left of Ronald Reagan in a detention center won’t help any of that. That example of how much damage Trump was able to do to abortion rights and immigration because people couldn’t stand to vote for Hilary Clinton, just because she was objectively awful, is pretty illustrative of the calculus that should go into this election.

This logic of “the building we all live in needs major repairs and has for years, so there’s no need to put out the fire in the attic until we can address that” winds me up, yes. That’s absolutely true.