And how the unusual structures of Tesla and SpaceX lead to him being much more difficult to remove as CEO from those companies, as compared to more conventionally organized businesses.

This is a perfect example of the criminally underused word “sophomoric.” Almost all teenagers and young male adults go through a phase of it. It’s why second-year college students are “sophomores,” because right at that age is where it usually hits is peak.

It means that you’re smart enough to know that Elon Musk isn’t the CEO of Twitter, which is significant. Congratulations! But you’re also convinced that what you know is all a person would need to know, and other people being stupid is usually the explanation for things. You don’t take time to read the article which is talking about Tesla and SpaceX, both of which he is the CEO of. Nope, you just see “Elon Musk” and “CEO” and you know that a lot of people aren’t as well-informed as you, so you insert the word “Twitter” and spring to the races, convinced that you are right and this global media empire must just be full of idiots. You don’t even need to read the article. After all, you’re smarter than them.

Usually people grow out of it, eventually, as they contact the real world which contains other people who are also smart, and learn to think twice.

I’m probably fine. I am not in Germany. I just don’t want to make a problem for slrpnk.

Chapter 3: The Battle for the Future - AI

Musk and X seem to have long since spun out of control. These are not good signs for the avalanche that is currently rolling toward social networks, public communication and democracy as a whole: AI-generated content.

Musk is also involved here. After all, he once co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. In 2018, he left, and recently even sued co-founder Sam Altman because the company was no longer developing the technology for the benefit of humanity, but for pure profit.

Publicly, Musk enjoys the role of warning against the dangers of AI. In fact, he has long since launched a new AI company of his own, with a possibly far more dangerous model.

Through xAI, he offers paying X users a generative AI called Grok. The program delivers texts and now also images within seconds. Unlike ChatGPT, for example, there seem to be few moral, ethical or legal boundaries, but answers “to almost any question.” When the latest version of Grok was released in August, users reported that they were able to generate instructions for bomb making and Nazi propaganda without much ado. Or a plan for how a rampage at a school could be made as deadly as possible. In one test, analysts even had the AI draw a picture showing Musk in a classroom - holding an assault rifle.

Musk has since downplayed this, saying Grok is an AI committed to truth and that any errors are being corrected immediately. He touts Grok’s big advantage over the AI competition as the program’s ability to “access X in real time.” However, scientists at Northwestern University near Chicago see this very thing as the danger. “X is not exactly known for its accuracy,” the AI experts write. Musk’s AI could produce “misinformation on a large scale.” Moreover, Grok has no comprehensive safeguards in place to prevent misinformation from spreading uncontrollably.

Examples already exist. After Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the Democratic presidential nomination, Grok spread the false news, shared millions of times, for over a week that candidates could no longer be changed so late in the race. Ministers from five U.S. states complained helplessly to Musk that Grok had lied about the U.S. election process.

Is this the political battlefield of the future? Social networks in which an unrestrained and unbridled AI is at the service of trolls and enemies of democracy, autocrats and despots of any color and provenance, giving them the opportunity to produce lies in unprecedented quantity and convincing quality? Does truth, does democracy even stand a chance against this?

The beauty for Musk is that he can’t even be held liable for such madness.

“The original sin,” says German media scholar Joseph Vogl, currently teaching at Princeton University in the U.S., was the year 1996. That’s when the U.S. government restructured its telecommunications law so that platform operators can no longer be held liable for the content distributed on them - but their users can. The calls for violence and discrimination that exist today on X and at Musk’s behest are an effect of this privilege, he says: “In a democratic media world, this liability privilege would have to be abolished.”

Meanwhile, Musk is creating facts, shifting resources, talent and money from his companies toward xAI for months. He’s building the next big thing, a “computer gigafactory” that’s growing on the site of an old industrial factory on the outskirts of Memphis. Nothing less than the “world’s largest supercomputer” is what it’s supposed to become.

Theoretically, he could one day feed this monstrous machine with the unimaginable mass of data his various companies collect all over the world. For example, the data that his millions of Teslas record daily on the world’s roads. Or the data generated by SpaceX’s rocket launches. Or possibly the data that Neuralink will soon collect from human brains.

Artificial intelligence could be the interface for Elon Musk to connect his previously rather disparate empire. Someone like him has all the resources to be at the forefront of the AI race as well. Especially if he saves everything that makes the technology expensive and complicated: a well-positioned security department that contains the machine and protects humanity. xAI would thus become a powerful central hub in Musk’s empire, a data cockpit at whose control knobs the billionaire himself would sit. Next to him perhaps his buddy Trump. Possibly as president. Duo infernale.

All done.

Whatever. If this is inappropriate, let me know and I’ll delete them.

Chapter 2: The Attack on Democracy

In a former factory hall in Palo Alto, Peter Barrett strolls past a gigantic indoor slide before slumping into a chair in a conference room and crossing his legs. Barrett is founder and chief technologist of Playground, one of those venture capitalists that turn startups into corporations and their founders into multimillion-dollar CEOs with their investments in Silicon Valley. Barrett was once one of those himself. His computer games forge Rocket Science Games wanted to combine the best of Hollywood and Silicon Valley on the screen. To do that, he brought some of the country’s most talented programmers on board, including a certain Elon Musk.

The company flopped a few years later, Musk moved on. Even then, Barrett says, he could see that Musk actually wanted to “do his own thing.” “He was very, very smart. Each of us knew that one day he would become an entrepreneur.” To this day, Barrett has a noticeable fascination for Musk’s drive. SpaceX and Tesla are “incredible companies,” Barrett says. Elon’s curiosity, his unbridled will paired with modesty, were “outstanding.” Then he pauses rhetorically.

“But his political views are a mystery to me.” His former friend Musk, now “not the boy I knew. And that’s very confusing and perplexing to me.” Today, South African-born Musk, once an immigrant to the U.S. himself, rails against migrants, denies climate change with Trump, which he once wanted to fight with Tesla.

Why? Barrett, long financially independent himself, shakes his head. Being a billionaire can be a challenge. “Because suddenly you can do anything you want.” There are no more limits for “messianic characters.” Musk apparently thinks “only of himself,” no longer of the common good. “And that’s very human. When people cheer you long enough, you start to believe some of it at some point.” Money corrupts character, the saying goes. But does that make his former employee Musk a danger to humanity? Barrett doesn’t have to search long for an answer. X is “not a good way” for Elon to use his technical talent. But a “real challenge” - because the platform can be “used as a weapon to threaten democracy.”

When Elon Musk took over Twitter two years ago, he made two promises to the world: the platform would be politically “neutral” under him - and free of any censorship. He hoped he would thereby “promote democracy and civil discourse.”

In fact, right after the purchase, Musk began rebuilding Twitter into a political agitation machine. The price of $44 billion seemed grotesque. But the economic consideration falls short. Musk can now undisturbed create the reality in which he apparently lives - or wants to live.

With the takeover, Musk fired the majority of the international teams that had previously moderated the most blatant content. At the same time, he reactivated numerous blocked user accounts, including many of conspiracy ideologues and right-wing extremists. When authoritarian regimes like Turkey demand deletions and bans, Musk readily complies. Journalists he doesn’t like are sometimes blocked. Musk parted ways with a well-known U.S. TV moderator who was supposed to get a new format on X before the first episode aired: He didn’t like the questions for the talk show guest - that was Musk himself.

Like an authoritarian guru, Musk rants on X against illegal migrants, established media and the “woke” zeitgeist. He regularly spreads conspiracy myths that are suitable for undermining trust in democracy and its institutions.

According to an analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted 50 misleading or false posts about the U.S. election via his channel from January to July of this year. They were viewed around 1.2 billion times. The secret services of the GDR called this strategy “erosion.” Under Musk, Twitter has become a “home for hate and disinformation,” law professor Maya Wiley tells DER SPIEGEL. The billionaire directly promoted the accounts of white racists and neo-Nazis, says the chair of the largest association of U.S. civil rights movements.

Musk biographer Walter Isaacson describes a “demon mode” that Musk sometimes slips into. A kind of dark tunnel the billionaire gets into. “Then he gets dark and retreats into the storm in his head,” is how Musk’s ex-partner, Canadian musician Grimes, describes it. She talks about Musk’s emotional awareness being developed differently than in average people. “He has different moods and many quite different personalities, and he switches between them extremely quickly.”

For X, the new boss is damaging to business. Almost all major advertising clients, such as Apple and Disney, have now withdrawn from the platform. Musk announced he would sue them, accused them of “blackmail” and threw a “Fuck yourself” after them. According to investment firm Fidelity, X’s market value is now only around $9.4 billion - not even a quarter of the purchase price.

From his fans, however, Musk gets frenzied applause for his course. They like and retweet every crude claim, many admire him unconditionally. When Musk spread in July that voting machines and mail-in ballots were too insecure and only in-person voting should be allowed, only agreement was found among the most widely circulated comments. Recently, he made the claim that Democrats want to import millions of migrants, who then allegedly vote for them by a majority. This nonsense was read more than 100 million times.

Wait, is this legal? It’s starting to feel like I am breaking a rule here. There’s more.

Chapter 1: Personal Radicalization

Paige Holland-Thielen chooses a restaurant with a gluten-free menu, heads for a table in the garden, orders a sandwich. She recently moved here with her partner, to Rochester, Minnesota. Far away from California or Texas, far away from Elon Musk. The places where Musk’s companies are located, says the woman with long, curly hair, are beautiful. But nothing would bring her back there.

Holland-Thielen has been through an odyssey. For four and a half years, the engineer worked in a leadership position at Musk’s space company SpaceX, accompanying rocket launches and satellite flights. When she started in Austin, Texas, in 2018, Holland-Thielen says, SpaceX was “a dream job.” “I’ve always loved space. Now I had the chance to really make something happen, to shoot real rockets into space.”

At least since Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, humanity has known how close genius and madness can sometimes be. And listening to Holland-Thielen, it was similar with Musk as in the novel, in which the evil, murderous alter ego of Dr. Jekyll gradually breaks through.

Dr. Elon and Mr. Musk? “That Elon can be an asshole,” Holland-Thielen says, she knew when she signed on with SpaceX. Only the extent and speed of his radicalization were unimaginable to her.

Holland-Thielen sips her water, then reports on Musk’s escalation, at first slow, then progressing ever faster. There’s this scene from the early 2020s, for example. Holland-Thielen was a team leader, responsible for the organizational process of rocket launches at SpaceX, when she learned through a colleague that Musk was currently on the way to a customer in a private jet with his - male - team leaders. “Everyone was there. Except me. Even though everything converged with me,” Holland says. An oversight? That’s when she first realized how Elon ticked, Holland-Thielen says. But when she told her manager about it, suggesting complaining directly to Musk about his sexism, he advised against it: That would lead directly to dismissal. He and the team, however, could not afford to lose Holland-Thielen at the moment.

Soon Holland-Thielen found out that it wasn’t just happening to her. She and her colleagues had to put up with sexual harassment in the workplace several times. One higher-ranking employee, for example, once reacted to a graphic with a “sexual allusion to an erect penis,” asking her, “How can we get it up, higher, highest?” Musk himself had spoken many times on X and in internal emails about his “wiener,” his sausage - and wanted that to be understood as a joke in hindsight. That’s also what it says in a letter to the board of directors and a lawsuit Holland-Thielen and other employees filed against Musk in 2022. Both are available to DER SPIEGEL. She and seven other SpaceX managers were fired as a result. Almost nothing is left of Musk’s once-touted “No Asshole” and “Zero Tolerance” policy toward foul-mouthed, abusive bosses, the employees complain in the letter. SpaceX’s “current systems” and “culture do not live up to the company’s stated values.” Musk, who considers the lawsuits unfounded, mocks people based on their gender, sexual orientation, age or religion. The billionaire treats and judges women according to their bra size, runs “his company in the dark Middle Ages” and offers “those who question the ‘Animal House’ environment that they can find another job if they don’t like it.”

All of this, the employees conclude, leaves only one conclusion: “SpaceX must quickly and expressly distance itself from Elon’s personal brand.”

In fact, SpaceX is farther from that than ever. As with Tesla, Musk has filled the company’s supervisory bodies with friends and relatives, at least people loyal to him. No objection is to be expected. Musk, the largest shareholder himself, exercises three roles simultaneously: Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technical Officer, and Chairman of the Board.

Equipped with such omnipotence, Musk has shed any shyness about using his company as a means of coercion. SpaceX is indispensable not only for NASA. With Starlink, Musk also has enormous blackmail potential - against democrats as well as despots.

The company appears in almost every global crisis: Starlink is used by paramilitary forces in Sudan, to fight Houthi rebels in Yemen, or in a hospital in the Gaza Strip. When Russia invaded Ukraine two and a half years ago and destroyed communications infrastructure across the board, it was Musk who, in an allegedly generous act, quickly restored Internet access to Ukrainians: He had Starlink activated there and donated receiving antennas. And when Hurricane “Helene” recently hit the southern U.S. states, President Joe Biden had to call on Musk for help to provide 30 days of free Starlink use for the areas affected by the hurricane.

The more chaotic and insecure conditions become in the world, the better for Musk. From this perspective, too, Donald Trump would be a blessing for him. Global Internet traffic via his satellites has tripled in the past year alone. Starlink now has three million customers in 99 countries. More than six and a half billion dollars, analysts estimate, Musk is likely to turn over with them per year. 7,000 of his satellites circle the Earth today in low orbits, accounting for about 60 percent of all active spacecraft. One could say: Musk has long dominated space as well.

How far he goes with this arsenal was recently shown in Brazil. When a constitutional judge there dared to ban Musk’s short message service X from the country because the platform was continuously spreading disinformation and thus endangering public order, Musk insulted and threatened the court and Brazil’s president - and finally picked a bizarre fight over his Internet provider Starlink, which is essential for local farmers, for example, who often control their machines with the help of the service. In the end, Musk accepted the millions in fines to get X unlocked again. But that seems to have only reinforced him in his furor - as his enthusiasm for Brazil’s former right-wing populist president Jair Bolsonaro shows.

For Holland-Thielen, her former boss is now a “dangerous person.” She says she can’t understand how people can still work in his companies and drive his cars. “I never want to give Elon another dollar or get one from him,” she says. “I’m very, very shocked by what he’s become.”

Here’s a better translation. It’s long.

Trump Crony Elon Musk: Public Enemy Number Two

Elon Musk owns powerful companies, rockets, satellites, the X network. Now, together with Donald Trump, he’s taking aim at his biggest project: the erosion of liberal democracy.

By Markus Becker, Simon Book, Max Hoppenstedt and Marcel Rosenbach

Perhaps one should simply listen more closely to Elon Musk. Recently, for example, in his interview with the far-right US talker Tucker Carlson: So far, no one has tried to kill the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, he said, “because it would have been pointless” - and called her a “puppet” and a “marionette”. Amid much laughter. He had previously tweeted and deleted similar things. Because he realized that some of his fans might understand that as a call to action?

Or his tirade against Taylor Swift, the most successful musician of our time, an avowed Democrat, smeared by the Trump camp as a “childless cat lady”. A day after Swift publicly endorsed Kamala Harris, Musk wrote to his 200 million followers on X: “Nice Taylor … you won … I will give you a child and protect your cats with my life.” Just a crude joke? Or a threat of rape? Misogynistic, in any case.

A normal company boss probably wouldn’t have survived any of these statements in office.

Recently, Musk appeared alongside his new close friend Donald Trump, who returned to Butler, Pennsylvania a few days ago to let fans celebrate him at the site of his rally. With him on stage stood Musk, dressed in a “Dark MAGA” cap, Make America Great Again in black letters on a black background. In this getup, he spoke and painted the darkest pictures, serving the crowd a pile of hair-raising untruths:

The Harris camp wants to steal the election, abolish democracy, silence them. The only one who can preserve the Constitution of the United States, save the nation, is Trump. “We must win. We must,” Musk called out to Trump supporters. Otherwise, “this will be our last election here.”

Another boundary crossed, again without consequences.

Probably one should not only listen more closely to Elon Musk. You actually have to. Anything else would be naive.

In 2016 and 2020, the sharpest attacks on the US election came from the shadows: Russian troll factories tried to manipulate the public covertly. The Capitol stormers gathered online primarily in dark niches of the web.

This time, the attacks are coming from one of the heart chambers of the country: Silicon Valley. And they can be observed on an open stage, read in feeds clicked millions of times by Musk and the online mob following him.

The richest man in the world, equipped with a big mouth, a fortune of 250 billion dollars, a publicly celebrated penchant for intoxicants against his depression and illnesses, an astonishing love for autocrats and dictators, a now strictly right-wing worldview and a hatred for everything woke, leftist, queer or even just too democratic, embodies a completely new type of magnate: He not only controls access to the masses. But also to virtually inexhaustible sources of money. And, most importantly, to state-of-the-art high-tech infrastructure.

For months, Musk has been supporting Trump’s re-election with his own specially founded supporter association, called a PAC, pumped up with hundreds of millions of dollars. Time and again, the two met at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to broker the deal. In the past three months alone, Musk transferred a whopping 75 million to @America’s account - to capture votes. The PAC promises a $47 cash bonus to all those who recruit a new Trump voter in the swing states who pledges to the PAC’s goals. Musk himself has just set off on a multi-day roadshow through Pennsylvania to convince people there of world savior Trump.

According to the mission statement, @America - and thus Musk - is about taking a hard line on immigration and having as little regulation as possible, for example on gun ownership. The multi-entrepreneur has been pursuing his crusade against any form of “wokeness” since his once son-born daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson publicly disowned him. He had been a cruel father who “desperately seeks attention and validation from an army of conspiracy-theorizing online users,” she wrote on the web. Previously, Musk had declared her “dead” because of her decision to live as a woman - and as a victim of the “Woke mind virus”.

The billionaire’s weapon of choice against this virus is his platform X, formerly Twitter. Here he not only incites hatred himself. He also uses X to specifically amplify the reach of Trump’s lies - and delete unwanted criticism. Colloquially, this is called censorship. Yet Musk had allegedly once bought the former Twitter to secure humanity’s right to free expression.

Musk not only dominates the world of tweets. The power he can wield through his various companies is nothing short of dizzying.

Since 2008, his automaker Tesla has put seven million electric cars on the roads - which Musk could control remotely if he wanted to. Without his space company SpaceX and its rockets, NASA today can hardly launch a single satellite into space. With Neuralink, Musk recently obtained regulatory approval in the U.S. to implant chips into human brains. Musk’s satellite Internet provider Starlink brings broadband connections to the most remote corners of the earth - and to every modern battlefield. Including Ukraine and Israel. It’s hard to imagine what would happen if he simply shut down the network there.

An anti-democratic attitude paired with power over mobile, flying, digital, and high-tech infrastructure - typically, those are the ingredients for the villain’s role in a James Bond movie. “The World Is Not Enough” would fit well. Unfortunately, this dystopia is not playing out in the cinema, but in reality.

Elon Musk’s companies left a request from DER SPIEGEL unanswered. But even so, one can grasp the historically new dimensions of power Musk has accumulated. Perhaps best by comparing him to other moguls whose influence is or was not exactly small either.

Rupert Murdoch, for example, owns newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and TV channels like Fox News worldwide, the man and his titles are staunchly conservative, right-wing in case of doubt. But he himself has never publicly appeared as an opinion leader, nor did he ever aspire to political office. Musk, on the other hand, is the loudest voice on his own global platform. In the event of a Trump election victory, he wants to become part of the U.S. government. Trump has already promised him that.

In the 1920s, former Krupp director Alfred Hugenberg bought himself a media empire to wield in the election campaign: “Make the right wing strong for me!” In 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed him Reich Minister of Economics. Today, the conservative is considered a stirrup holder for the dictator. Hugenberg, Hitler? Does this overestimate Musk’s historical role?

So far, he has always been underestimated. German car managers long had nothing but scorn and derision for Tesla - until they only saw Musk’s taillights. Similar with SpaceX. The very idea of wanting to compete with the state-owned NASA seemed completely crazy to many. Not to mention his mission to colonize Mars and reuse rockets.

In fact, SpaceX has long since overtaken NASA. Last weekend, the arms of the launch pad caught his Starship’s rockets again, a crazy spectacle. The American space agency now regularly uses the Musk rocket to bring new crews to the space station.

Pushing boundaries, destroying boundaries is something like Musk’s entrepreneurial elixir of life. Boundaries of technical feasibility, boundaries of what is conceivable, boundaries of the planet. Musk embodies the figure of the Silicon Valley system disruptor like no other. The man has disrupted entire industries and overcome seemingly ironclad laws.

Now he is applying this principle to politics - and has found his suitable partner in Donald Trump. The biographical development is bizarre. Musk once declared himself a “moderate”. Within a few years, he has become not only a right-wing political hardliner, but also an avowed opponent of the liberal democratic USA. The troll-in-chief has mutated into a political agitator. One could say: Donald Trump is probably the greatest current threat to the free world. But his buddy Musk is at least public enemy number two.

It would be both naive and dangerous not to take Musk seriously on this, his probably most enormous and most consequential mission. So far, the man has only had one experience: No one can stop him.

He doesn’t know how to pronounce “Goebbels,” does he.

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.

Does that mean hostile but popular comments in the wrong communities would have a pass though?

They have no effect. The impact of someone’s upvote is dependent on how much trust from the wider community that person has. It’s a huge recursive formula, almost the same as PageRank. The upshot is that those little isolated wrong communities have no power unless the wider community also gives them some upvotes. It’s a very clever algorithm. I like it a lot.

For normal minority communities like vegans, that’s not a problem. They still get some upvotes, because the occasional conflict isn’t the normal state, so they count as normal users. They post stuff, people generally upvote more than they downvote by about 10 to 1, and they are their own separate thing, which is fine. For minority communities that are totally isolated from interactions with the wider community, they just have more or less 0 rank, so it doesn’t matter what they think. They’re not banned, unless they’ve done something, but their votes do almost nothing. For minority communities that constantly pick fights with the wider community, they tend to have negative rank, so it also doesn’t matter what they think, in terms of the impact of them mutually upvoting each other.

I think it might be a good idea to set up “canary” communities, vegans being a great example, with the bot posting warnings if users from those communities start to get ranked down. That can be a safety check to make sure it is working the way it’s supposed to. Even if that downranking does happen, it might be fine, if their behavior is obnoxious and the community is reacting with downvotes, or it might be a sign of a problem. You have to look up people’s profiles and look at the details. In general, people on Lemmy don’t spend very much time going into the vegan community and spreading hate and downvotes just for the sake of hatred, because they saw some vegans being vegans. Usually there’s some reason for it.

One thing that definitely does happen is people from that minority community going out and picking fights with the wider community, and then beginning to make a whining sound when the reaction is negative, and claiming that the heat they’re getting is because of their viewpoint, and not because they’re being obnoxious. That happens quite a lot.

I think some of the instances that police and ban dissent set up a bad expectation for their users. People from there feel like their tribe is being attacked if they have to come into contact a viewpoint that they’re been told is the “wrong” one, and then they make these blanket proclamations about how their own point of view is God’s truth while attacking anyone who disagrees, and then they sincerely don’t expect the hostile response that they get. I think some of them sincerely feel silenced when that happens. I don’t know what to do about that other than be transparent and supportive about where the door to being able to post is, if they want to go through it, and otherwise minimizing the amount that they can irritate everyone else for as long as that’s their MO.

I still think that instead of the bot considering all of Lemmy as one community it would be better if moderators can provide focus for it because there are differences in values between instances and communities that I think should reflect in the moderation decisions that are taken.

It definitely does that. It just uses a more sophisticated metric for “value” than a hard-coding of which are the good communities and which are the bad ones.

I think the configuration options to give more weight or primacy to certain communities are still in the code. I’m not sure. I do see what you’re saying. I think it might be wise for me, if anyone does wind up wanting to play with this, to give as many tools as possible to moderators who want to use it, and just let them make the decision. I think the bot is capable of working without needing configuration which ones are the good communities, but if someone can replicate my checking into it, they’ll be happier with the outcome whether or not they wind up with the same conclusions as me.

And yes, definitely making it advisory to the moderators, instead of its own autonomous AI drone banhammer, will increase people’s trust.

A few times a week, I regret calling the community “pleasant.” It was meant to mean “jerk-free,” but it’s a misnomer. US politics isn’t all that pleasant right at the mo.

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.

For example how do you think the bot would’ve handled the vegan community debacle that happened.

That’s not a situation it’s completely equipped to handle. It can decide what the community’s opinion of someone is, but it’s not going to be able to approach any kind of judgement call, in terms of whether a post by a permitted user is unexpectedly dangerous misinformation that the admins need to remove. That’s a judgement call that humans can’t effectively come to a conclusion on, so definitely the bot won’t be able to do any better.

There is some interesting insight to be had. One of the big concerns that people had about the bot’s premise was that it would shut down minority opinions, with vegans as a perfect example.

I tried going back and having it judge https://lemmy.world/post/18691022, but there may not be recent activity for a lot of those users, so there’s a risk of false negatives. The only user it found which it wanted to do anything to was [email protected], who it wanted to greylist, meaning they’re allowed to post, but anything of theirs that gets downvotes will get removed. That sounds right to me, if you look at their modlog.

I also spent some time just now asking it to look at comments from vegantheoryclub.com and modern comments from [email protected], and it didn’t want to ban or greylist anybody. That’s in keeping with how it’s programmed. Almost all users on Lemmy are fine. They have normal participation to counterbalance anything unpopular that they like to say, or any single bad day where they get in a big argument. The point is to pick out the users that only like to pick fights or start trouble, and don’t have a lot that they do other than that, which is a significant number. You can see some of them in these comments. I think that broader picture of people’s participation, and leeway to get a little out of pocket for people who are normal human people, is useful context that the bot can include that would be time-prohibitive when human mods are trying to do it when they make decisions.

The literal answer to your question is that I don’t think it would have done anything about the Vegan cat food issue other than letting everyone hash it out, and potentially removing some comments from EndlessApollo. But that kind of misinformation referee position isn’t quite the role I envisioned for it.

Like you said it sounds like a good way of decentralizing moderation so that we have less problems with power tripping moderators and more transparent decisions.

I wasn’t thinking in these terms when I made it, but I do think this is a very significant thing. We’re all human. It’s just hard to be fair and balanced all of the time when you’re given sole authority over who is and isn’t allowed to speak. Initially, I was looking at the bot as its own entity with its own opinions, but I realized that it’s not doing anything more than detecting the will of the community with as good a fidelity as I can achieve.

I just want it so that communities can keep their specific values while easing their moderation burden.

This was a huge concern. We went back and forth over a big number of specific users and situations to make sure it wasn’t going to do this, back in the early days of testing it out and designing behaviors.

I think the vegan community is a great example. I think there was one vegan user who was a big edge case in the early days, and they wound up banned, because all they wanted to talk about was veganism, and they kept wanting to talk about it to non-vegans in a pretty unfriendly fashion. I think their username was vegan-related also. I can’t remember the specifics, but that was the only case like that where the bot was silencing a vegan person, and we hemmed and hawed a little but wound up leaving them banned.

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.

There’s a big difference between nonsense, bad faith, and something coherent that you just don’t agree with.

Being unable to make sense of something that isn’t what you believe, pretending that the person saying it must be horrible or stupid, is a hallmark of intellectual weakness. That’s your option, but I would recommend that you grow out of it at some point.

The robot has nothing to do with this. No one involved is going to get banned or moderated, because everyone involved is interested at least on some level in real conversation and debate. I’m just weighing in to tell you interpersonally that I think you’re being a jerk in this instance. I think it would be to your benefit to back up and realize that the person may have a point about self-medicating with weed being a bad idea after a certain point, irrespective of any legal issues. Whether or not you wind up ultimately being convinced by any of it, that’s a more mature way to do it than immediately going on the warpath against them.

You can do that now, and evade human moderation in the same way.

I don’t want you to give it a try in the Santa communities, even though it would be a badly-needed test of the system. The code that’s supposed to detect and react to that doesn’t get much action. Mostly it’s been misfiring on the innocent case, and attacking innocent people because they’re new and they said one wrong thing one day. I think I fixed that, but it would be nice to test it in the other case, with some participation that I know is badly intended, and make sure it’s still capable of reacting and nuking the comments.

But no, please don’t. The remedy for that kind of thing is for admins to have to do work to find and ban you at the source, or look at banning VPNs or something which is sad for other reasons, so I don’t want that. Just leave it until real bad people do it for real, and then me and the admins will have to work out how to get rid of them when it happens.

I tried that early on. It does have a “perspective,” in terms of what communities are the trusted ones. What I found was that more data is simply better. It’s able to sort out for itself who the jerks are, and who are the widely trusted social networks, when it looks at a global picture. Trying to tell it to interpret the data a certain configured way or curtail things, when I tried it, only increased the chance of error without making it any better-tuned to the specific community it’s looking at.

I think giving people some insight into how it works, and ability to play with the settings, so to speak, so they feel confident that it’s on their side instead of being a black box, is a really good idea. I tried some things along those lines, but I didn’t get very far along.

Maybe it’d be nice to set it up so it’s more transparent. Instead of auto-banning, it can send auto-reports to the moderators with comments which it considers to be bad, and an indication of how bad or why. And then, once a week, it can publish a report of what it’s done and why, some justification for anyone who it took action against, so that everyone in the community can see it, so there aren’t surprises or secrets.

I thought about some other ideas, such as opening up an “appeal” community where someone can come in and talk with people and agree not to be a jerk, and get unbanned as long as they aren’t toxic going forward. That, coupled with the idea that if you come in for your appeal and yell at everyone that you are right and everyone else is wrong and this is unfair, your ban stays, could I think be a good thing. Maybe it would just be a magnet for toxicity. But in general, one reason I really like the idea is that it’s getting away from one individual making decisions about what is and isn’t toxic and outsourcing it more to the community at large and how they feel about it, which feels more fair.