- 4 Posts
- 22 Comments
They have not. I just did some analysis of it, and there is one person whose account has downvoted almost every comment that the bot has left. They have around a thousand other votes, so it’s unlikely to be a single-issue votebot account, but they also have no posts or comments, which is suspect. It seems plausible that there’s something mechanical going on which might be concerning. On the other hand, it’s only one person. There is one other person who has given so many downvotes to the bot that it’s suspicious, also.
Aside from those two accounts, it all looks like real downvotes. There are accounts which have given hundreds of downvotes to the bot, but they’re all recognizable as highly active real accounts, so it makes sense that they would give mass downvotes to the bot.
People just don’t like the bot. Have you considered listening to the pretty extensive explanations they’ve given in this comments section as to why?
I’m saying that the bot is incorrect. Look up any pro-Palestinian or -Arab source on it, and you’ll find a pretty bald-faced statement that it is factually suspect, because its viewpoint is anti-Israel. Look up the New York Times, which regularly reports factually untrue things, including one which caused a major journalistic scandal near the beginning of the war in Gaza, and check its factual rating.
Every report of bias is from somebody’s point of view. That part I have no issue with. Pretending that a source is or isn’t factual depending on whether it matches your particular bias is something different entirely.
Can you give an example of someone who ever posted something disingenuous that MediaBiasFactCheck got in the way of?
It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes
It all just suddenly clicked into place for me.
I think there’s a strong possibility that you’re right. It would explain all the tortured explanations for why the bot is necessary, coupled with the absolute determination to keep it regardless of how much negative feedback it’s getting. Looking at it as a little ad included in every comments section makes the whole thing make sense in a way that, taken at face value, it doesn’t.
Most people don’t want the bot to be there, because they don’t agree with its opinion about what is “biased.” It claims factually solid sources are non-factual if they don’t agree with the author’s biases, and it overlooks significant editing of the truth in sources that agree with the author’s biases.
In addition, one level up the meta, opposition to the bot has become a fashionable way to rebel against the moderation, which is always a crowd pleaser. The fact that the politics moderators keep condescendingly explaining that they’re just looking out for the best interests of the community, and the bot is obviously a good thing and the majority of the community that doesn’t want it is getting their pretty little heads confused about things, instigates a lot of people to smash the downvote button reflexively whenever they see its posts.
1·3 months agoI made this system because I, also, was concerned about the macro social implications.
Right now, the model in most communities is banning people with unpopular political opinions or who are uncivil. Anyone else can come in and do whatever they like, even if a big majority of the community has decided they’re doing more harm than good. Furthermore, when certain things get too unpleasant to deal with on any level anymore, big instances will defederate from each other completely. The macro social implications of that on the community are exactly why I want to try a different model, because that one doesn’t seem very good.
You seem to be convinced ahead of time that this system is going to censor opposing views, ignoring everything I’ve done to address the concern and indicate that it is a valid concern. Your concern is noted. If you see it censoring any opposing views, please let me know, because I don’t want it to do that either.
It’s difficult. A downvote from an account with no history does nothing. Your bot has to post a lot of content first to attract upvotes from genuine accounts. Then once you’ve accumulated some rank, you can start giving upvotes or downvotes in bulk to the accounts you want to manipulate. It’s impossible to completely prevent that, but you have to do it a lot to have an impact.
I think this model is more resistant to trickery than it would seem, but it’s not completely resistant. I do expect some amount of trickery that will then need counter-trickery. On the other hand, the problem of tricking the system also exists in the current moderation model. You don’t have to outwit the system to get your content posted or ban your enemy if it’s trivial to flood the comment section with your content from alt accounts and drown them out instead. I don’t know for sure that something like that is happening, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that was one reason why there are so many obnoxiously vocal people.
You’re not banned or even close to it. The ban list is surprisingly lenient in terms of people’s differing political views. You have to habitually make enemies of a lot of the people in the comments, one way or another, with a big fraction of what you post. Most people don’t do that, wherever on the political spectrum they might fall.
Whether that’s a good idea or not remains to be seen. I had some surprises today.
Here are examples of things you got positive rank for, politics and argumentation:
- https://midwest.social/comment/10357782
- https://midwest.social/comment/10246105
- https://midwest.social/post/13347310
Here are examples of things you got negative rank for, not directly political interpersonal squabbling:
- https://midwest.social/comment/10412423
- https://midwest.social/comment/10413376
- https://midwest.social/comment/10432272
Maybe this is harsh, but I think this is a good decision by the bot. The first list is fine. Most of your political views are far from unpopular on Lemmy. The thing is that you post a lot more of the squabbling content than the political content. You said you’re being unpleasant on purpose, don’t plan to stop, and that people should probably block you. I feel okay about excluding that from this community.
If in the future you change your mind about how you want to converse, you can send a comment or DM. We can talk about it, make sure you’re not being targeted unfairly, but in the meantime this is completely fair.
Look at him, he’s so happy.
Maybe it should be Bernie smiling, instead? I didn’t want to be openly partisan.
Do you mind if I give some examples? What you’re saying is valid in the abstract, but I think pointing out concrete examples of what the bot is reacting to will shed some light on what I’m talking about.
I looked at the bot’s judgements about your user. The issue isn’t your politics. Anti-center or anti-Western politics are the majority view on Lemmy, and your posts about your political views get ranked positively. The problem is that somehow you wind up in long heated arguments with “centrists” which wander away from the topic and get personal, where you double down on bad behavior because you say that’s the tactic you want to employ to get your point across. That’s the content that’s getting ranked negatively, and often enough to overcome the weight of the positive content.
If Lemmy split into a silo that was the 98.6% of users that didn’t do that, and a silo of 1.4% of users that wanted to do that, I would be okay with that outcome. I completely agree with your concern in the abstract, but that’s not what’s happening here.
It’s in the sidebar:
Post political news, or your own opinions or discussion. Anything goes. No personal attacks, no bigotry, no spam. Those will get a manual temporary ban.
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.
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.
Reasonable. I wasn’t trying to jump down your throat about it. I was a little annoyed at the comments which are positing some sort of fantasy scenario where the bot is useful, but where people hate it for irrational reasons. But yours was a reasonable question, definitely, in particular because for at least one account, it looks like what you described is exactly what’s happening.