[email protected] is live! If you missed the previous discussion, it’s a community with a robot moderator that bans you if the community doesn’t like your comments, even if you’re not “breaking the rules.” The hope is to have a politics community without the arguing. [email protected] has an in-depth explanation of how it works.
I was trying to keep the algorithm a secret, to make it more difficult to game the system, but the admins convinced me that basically nobody would participate if they could be banned by a secret system they couldn’t know anything about. I posted the code as open source. It works like PageRank, by aggregating votes and assigning trust to users based on who the community trusts and banning users with too low a trust level.
I’ve also rebalanced the tuning of the algorithm and worked on it more. It now bans a tiny number of users (108 in total right now), but still including a lot of obnoxious accounts. There are now no slrpnk users banned. It’s a lot of lemmy.world people, a few from lemmy.ml or lemm.ee, and a scattering from other places.
Check it out! Let me know what you think.
I agree with your points and general philosophy, but I guess I the flaw I was trying to address is that good users can post bad content and vice versa. So moderation strategies that can make decisions based on individual comments might be better than just banning individuals that on average we don’t like.
This would require a totally different approach, and I don’t think your tool necessarily needs to solve every problem, but it’s worth pondering.
I think I see it the opposite. There’s a population that posts normal stuff and sometimes crosses a line and posts inflammatory stuff. And there’s a population that has no interest in being normal or civil with their conversation, which can sometimes be kept in line to some degree by the moderators, or sometimes gets removed if they can’t.
The theory behind this moderation is that it’s better to leave alone the first population, but outright remove the whole second population, while still giving them the option of coming back in if they want to change their way of interacting on a longer-term timescale. My guess is that it’s better to do that than to keep them in line by removing comments every now and then, but not intervene unless they cross certain lines, which means they can continue to make unwanted postings according to the community while skirting the lines of acceptable levels of offensiveness, according to the moderators.
Whether that theory is accurate remains to be seen, of course.