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.

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:

• https://slrpnk.net/comment/11257933
• https://slrpnk.net/comment/11257387

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.

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.

The tool that detects unreasonable people and is effective at combatting them, a whole lot of unreasonable people really don’t like, and they’re being really unreasonable in how they approach the conversation. Go figure.

It wouldn’t be hard to make it work on PieFed. A first step, having it load up the voting flow patterns and make its judgements, would be very easy. It just needs a PieFed version of db.py, it would take 10-20 minutes. Is that something you’re interested in me working up? If I did that, it would be pretty simple for someone to get it working on PieFed, just fill in .env and run the script. Then you’d have to fire up the interpreter, unpickle user_ranks.pkl and start poking around in there, but I could give you some guidance.

That’s where I would start with it. Getting it to speak to the PieFed API to enact its judgements would be a separate thing, but checking it out and seeing what it thinks of your users and how easy it is to work with, as a first step, is very easy.

I had this vague vision of augmenting Lemmy so that it has a user-configurable jerk filter, which can be switched to filter out the avowed jerks from your view of the Lemmyverse regardless of whether the moderators are getting the job done. I think putting the control in the hands of the users instead of the mods and admins would be a nice thing. If you want to talk about that for PieFed, that sounds grand to me.

The guy set himself up for it for saying a god damn word about “suppression of dissenting voices” while he’s logging into SuppressionOfDissentingVoices.ml every day to access his Lemmy account.

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.

It’s the last 30 days of comments. That’s long enough to be robust, but short enough that someone can realistically rehabilitate their image with the bot by not being a jerk for 30 days, and restore their posting ability.

I was hoping that it would be a good tool for self-reflection and fairness in moderation. In practice, the people who get banned for being jerks are totally uninterested in revising their commenting strategy, and choose instead just to yell at me that I’m awful and my bot is unfair and it should be their right to come in and be a jerk if they want to, and banning them means I am breaking Lemmy. Then they restart one of the arguments that got them banned in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking, expecting anything different, but that’s what happened. You can see some of it happening in these comments.

New accounts, or accounts that have been recently inactive, are a hard problem. I think I’ve got it mostly worked out now. If the bot has limited information, it won’t ban you, but it will be super-strict if you have a generally negative reception, and if its unclear impression of you is negative and you also make a comment that gets downvoted, it’ll delete the comment. I think it should work fairly well, but it’s still in development. It’s hard to test, because that situation only comes up a few times a month, so I basically just have to wait a while every time I do it.

You can check a user by searching the modlog for their user, and santa@slrpnk.net as the moderator, and see what comes up. If you see that they’ve been banned at any point, then they are probably a reprobate of one sort or another.

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.

You can give me a sentiment analysis, if you want to, you have my profile.

Your 1-star review is noted. When I open a Yelp page for the bot, I’ll be sure to let you know, and you can speak to my manager about it.

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?

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.

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.

Big if true.

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.

I 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.