I played around with possibilities for a while, and did some more fixing and tweaking of the algorithm and visualization tools. Here’s one way I think it could work. Once a week, the bot could post a breakdown of three random users who are permitted to post, and three random users who aren’t permitted to post. Right now, that breakdown would be:

Permitted to post:

Not permitted to post:

That means that anyone who wants to can check up on how it’s making its decisions. Then, in addition, anyone who wants an explanation for their user, I can do that.

Those charts are anonymized. I’ll send the users in question to some of the admins to see what they think. I think it’s okay to post a few users, as long as it’s random and not repetitive. I don’t think it would come across as singling anyone out or making them uncomfortable, but I’m curious what other people think.

There’s not a cap. That type of activity is, in fact, a classical failure mode of this type of network. Just like people learned to build link farms to artificially give page rank to fake pages, people can learn to farm for zeitgeist points to then give or take away rank from some targeted user. That is one reason I’m being cagey about giving away introspection tools or detailed road maps of people’s points. I don’t want to facilitate someone getting feedback about how well an effort like that is working.

I’m a little more concerned about people accumulating points and then upvoting a troll account to make sure it doesn’t get banned, than I am about people downvote-bombing someone they disagree with to ban them. They are both concerns, though. There are ways around both through tweaks to the algorithm, but I’ve constantly been surprised about how the tools work out in practice as compared to my theory about them, and so I’m waiting until it happens before I start messing with solutions to it. I do have some ideas in mind for how to deal with it. I am guessing that in the long run, it won’t be too big an issue, but I want to see how it works out in practice before actualizing the countermeasures I was thinking of.

What about this?

I see what you’re saying. The line graph feels kind of paternalistic. It’s saying that if you disagree with the herd, you’re going to lose your value. I think the spectral timeline with a legend may be better, at least for a frequent posting and followup use case.

The line graph is clearly better suited for discussing how the system functions though. For example, it appears a new member won’t get banned for a few negative interactions early in their career, as the cutoff is below zero.

Yes. We give some leeway so that someone doesn’t get penalized for a single random downvote early in their career, but we still need to be reactive enough that if someone makes a new account and posts a garbage comment, we jump on it. I have a process that’s meant to deal with that, but it’s tricky. I’m still working it out, and I rolled it out a little bit early so that it’s now jumping the gun and deleting some comments from people who really shouldn’t have their comments deleted.

It’s tough because it’s hard to test in the abstract, and by definition, the people who don’t comment a lot don’t leave too many comments to be able to use as test cases. What I’m planning to do is work on it a little bit more, testing in production, and once it’s worked out, I’ll make a post explaining it all.

This comment was deleted, but it shouldn’t have been. The code to aggressively delete comments from users who don’t have enough data to rank them, meaning potentially throwaway accounts, was malfunctioning, and deleted everything from any accounts without recent activity. It’s only supposed to trigger if that user has some downvotes, but it was deleting anything.

I’ve fixed the code and restored the comment.

And yes, I’m aware of the irony involved. To answer your point, I picked a terrible name for this community. People are not required to upvote you or agree with you, or even be nice to you. It’s meant as a place without toxic low-effort trolling, but certainly people are allowed to hit the downvote button to quickly express disapproval in addition to giving some more well-considered reasons for disagreeing with the stated argument.

What I was going for, unsuccessfully, by saying “pleasant” was that this person can say something like this viewpoint, and other people can disagree with them, but it doesn’t turn into a dumpster fire of personal insults, changes of subject, and wild accusations. At that, I think it’s succeeding, looking at this thread. People are not agreeing but it’s a lot calmer than an equivalent thread in a lot of Lemmy’s politics communities would be.

This comment was deleted, but it shouldn’t have been. The code to aggressively delete comments from users who don’t have enough data to rank them, meaning potentially throwaway accounts, was malfunctioning, and deleted everything from any accounts without recent activity. It’s only supposed to trigger if that user has some downvotes, but it was deleting anything.

I’ve fixed the code and restored the comment.

How about this?

That’s 30 days of Santa’s ranking for your user, showing the comment threads that made big impacts up or down. The dotted horizontal line is 0, and the cutoff for banning a person is down below that line. Here are some anonymized examples of people who got banned:

They were doing well until, in the pink part, they posted 28 comments heatedly insisting that there’s no genocide in Gaza.

I think this is informative about how the system works without being useful for gathering analytics to rig the system. You can see what kind of participation impacts it in what ways, and how to put it into the context of the sum total of your participation for the month, but the emphasis is on the comments and behavior instead of on the math. What do you think?

I’d rather we stage a revolution and do away with the current electoral system in favor of one that allows more than two viable parties.

These are in no way incompatible. Not electing Trump will do a huge amount to protect the people who are working on revolution doing away with the current system.

Also, I believe that not caring about the outcome is a valid stance. If you genuinely don’t have any interest in it, don’t have a firm opinion about the candidates, or whatever, it’s fine to not vote. You’d essentially be flipping a coin anyway, so let the folks that care have their say instead.

If you don’t care about the outcome of Harris versus Trump, then you’re either not aware of what’s going on, or in a position of extreme privilege. You’re not a Haitian, or a Hispanic, or God help you an undocumented immigrant, or a left-wing person living in a Trump-supporting area, or anyone who’s near the poverty line, or any other number of categories of people that Trump is going to do incredible levels of harm to.

You also don’t live on Earth, or else you’re going to die with no descendants before the most serious impacts of climate change start to come to fruition.

If you want to improve the current system, “abstaining as a protest” is selling a huge number of helpless and vulnerable people to suffer or die, for no particular benefit to anybody. That’s the point of this article.

I agree. I think spot-checking can do a lot to bring transparency into the picture, and if it’s done carefully, then it’ll be possible to avoid exposing too much about people who haven’t agreed to have it exposed about them.

I thought about it for a while, and I think doing a weekly spot-check post for a handful of controversial users, showing a visualization of their rank and where it is coming from, might work. Here’s one quickly hacked-up example in the form of a bar code. Time goes from left to right, blue stripes are positive rank, and red stripes are negative rank. Here’s your breakdown for the last month:

There are three big red stripes. From left to right, they are these threads:

• https://slrpnk.net/comment/10515543
• https://slrpnk.net/comment/10538239
• https://slrpnk.net/comment/10640493 and https://slrpnk.net/comment/10660153

There is also plenty of blue, though, so you’re comfortably over the line as a nice person under the current parameter set. It’s worth mentioning that a lot of the blue stripes are “unpopular” opinions from the point of view of the average liberal, that are popular on Lemmy, or detailed takedowns of MBFC:

• https://slrpnk.net/comment/10708613
• https://slrpnk.net/comment/10559859

My opinion is that most of the time, someone who’s garnering a healthy mixture of blue and red is probably showing good faith, and when someone is managing to garner mostly red, it’s more likely to be an issue of quality of engagement, not even necessarily that they’re trying to say something unpopular that the bot is then censoring. But, of course, the proof is in how it works in practice on real users and real content.

I think doing some type of visualization, maybe automatically generated, and showing the progression over time of someone’s rank depending on particular comments, can help to inform the discussion. I’m sure it won’t stop people from accusing me of all kinds of malfeasance in the way the bot operates, but it can help to put more eyes on it from people who are open and interested in seeing how it’s working.

1. It would be extraordinarily easy to bot it and just silence anyone you want.

You can try. Make a bunch of accounts on one of those instances that doesn’t police their signups very well, downvote everything I’ve ever done with all of those accounts, and see if I get banned. I think it’s more difficult to accomplish this than you think.

2. I agree, moderation is absolutely necessary to maintaine civil discussion, but silencing people, because they have unpopular opinions, is a really bad idea.
3. I love lemmy because it is the ultimate embodiment of decentralised free speech. This destroys that.
4. If I were a bad actor, hypothetically, let’s just say lammy.ml or haxbear and I decided I wanted to silence anyone who disagrees with what I have to say. Then I could just make a fork of this project to only value my instances votes and censor anyone who doesn’t agree with what my community thinks.
5. This tool simply acts as a force multiplier for those who want to use censorship as a tool for mass silencing of descent.

You posted that everyone in the US should need a nationally verified ID in order to make a social media account, and got dozens of downvotes. You also have some other unpopular opinions. You said Google should be shut down. You’re not banned or close to it. Why are you so sure that this tool is going to ban people for expressing unpopular opinions?

I get where you’re coming from. It’s a valid concern. I think an important part of the answer will be opening up the process, and maybe even taking it out of my hands as the sole proprietor of all the parameters, so it’s a community project instead of my project only.

I posted more about this:

https://slrpnk.net/post/13361827

1. I’m assuming that the voting is based on all accounts across all instances, so it’s not just your instance whose account creation rules matter, it’s all instances across the Fediverse, right?

Right.

2. I think ultimately people vote based on preconceived biases more than they will on the validity of an argument or its facts.

Sometimes. Not enough to overshadow other positive participation, in most cases. There’s a thing that does happen often, where the bulk of what someone says is their unpopular opinion, and they present it with a lot of hostility, so they spend most of their time collecting mostly downvotes. That will get you banned. That, I think, is a feature, not a bug.

I’d definitely love to see some data on how the experiment plays out. It’d be quite interesting if we could get that in full.

It’s a big invasion of everyone’s privacy for me to lay out all the data in full. Do you want me to break down its judgements about your user, so you can see some details of at least one case? I can do that, either here or over a DM.

I’d like to be able to lay out a more complete picture, too, if you have ideas for how I can break it down without creating drama.

3. I guess not necessarily free speech but more marketplace of ideas. I guess my main concern here is that it will get implemented across the Fediverse without Admins and moderators thinking about the long-term effects of such a system.

This is completely fair. What I talked about in https://slrpnk.net/post/13361827, spreading the operation of the tool out to the community instead of me operating it only, seems like it could be a good solution.

4. I prefer instances that have a more open policy in terms of defederation. I feel this tool could provide people who are willing to go to the lengths of vote manipulation, direct moderation capabilities without having to be a moderator in the community itself. Hence, I believe this would lead to instances with more open federation policies being more susceptible to manipulation by extremists.
5. Sure, but by the misuse of this tool I can affect the moderation of an individual on a community that I don’t have any moderation powers in.

Like I say, try it. It’s not impossible to do, but I would be surprised if anyone could make this work in reality without creating dummy accounts on an industrial scale.

An approach that will work better is to post content that will attract a lot of upvotes, raise your own user’s rank, and then downvote everything I’ve ever done from that single highly-ranked user. You can try that, as an alternative or in conjunction, and see how well it works, if you want to try.

I definitely think it’s an interesting experiment that’s worth running. But I’m hesitant to see what the outcomes of it will be if it gains mass adoption.

It’s definitely not a silver bullet. I have a tendency to look at the whole thing with rose-colored glasses, when it’s not perfect. I’m completely open to people poking holes in it or figuring out things that I’ve missed. All I would ask is that it be based in how it actually behaves, not just a theory about how it’s going to do all these terrible things, that’s not based on observing how it works in practice.

Then if we look together at what it actually does, and you find a problem, we can agree on it and I can potentially even fix it.

It never even occurred to me that carbon capture might be storing a giant tank of gaseous carbon dioxide. I assumed that it meant chemically reacting the carbon into some kind of solid material which was then discarded as waste, because trying to store huge chambers full of gaseous CO2 at a scale that can impact climate change is clinically insane.

Yes, not all young men are stupid. That’s an unfair stereotype. I do think it’s fair to say that as a group, they’re more likely to be too disorganized to vote, compared with other demographics, and I think that’s doubly true of the subset of them that Trump is trying to appeal to by appearing on bro podcasts.

I think you missed the big triangle you have to click on.

Here’s a transcript:

Election workers, the vast majority of them women, say they’re feeling vulnerable to the charged political climate surrounding the 2024 election. 38% of the women staffing the polls say they’ve experienced threats, harassment, or abuse, fueling the violence, disinformation, and conspiracy theories following the 2020 election.

Joining us now, Elizabeth Landers, lead correspondent for the Scripps News Disinformation Desk.

“And Liz, you traveled to Surrey County in North Carolina to really dig deep on this. What did you find?”

“We traveled there back in June to get a sense of how disinformation is impacting election workers, specifically the almost all-female team that heads up Surrey County’s elections. This is a small county. It’s about 70,000 people. It’s best known as the birthplace of Andy Griffith. And it’s overwhelmingly a red Republican area, went 75% for the former president in 2020. Despite that though, and despite him winning that area, this small community has been dealing with mis- and disinformation around the elections since they took place.”

“And the woman who heads up the elections there is Michelle Huff. She’s a team of just four other people helping her administer these elections. They’re working on this year-round. She described to us how things have changed since 2020. Take a listen.”

“I was actually in one store in downtown Mount Airy. I was cornered and pressed for 20 minutes. This person was getting everything that they felt 2020 election that Trump did not win because of what election officials in this country did. Even in my church, all of sudden election officials are people to not be trusted and not believe.”

“And Allie, disinformation in Surrey County for Michelle really reached a head in 2022. She said there were people that showed up at their office, confronted her about their voting systems, were asking her to see the voting machines, which the North Carolina State Board of Elections says that would have been illegal to give access to people who are not allowed to be around voting machines, that access to critical infrastructure there. They said they had evidence that the voting machines were pinging cell towers in 2020. So they were pushing conspiracies and unfounded information to her.”

“And Michelle has said that she has had to harden their office, make changes there that she never thought that she would have to consider the safety of herself, her staff, her family. But really, she has in the last four years. And she is concerned about this in the lead up to the election in November.”

“It makes a lot of sense, especially given the fact that this is a county that went so squarely for Trump. And yet the aspersions and bad faith that he has put upon the election system writ large are clearly even playing out in red counties. So then given what we saw in 2020, given what she’s experiencing in counties like this one, what’s being done to protect election workers? And I also imagine that this is impacting the number of people who want to be election workers.”

“Absolutely. The Brennan Center for Justice, who we interviewed for this piece, says that they are losing election workers at sort of an unprecedented rate right now. People just don’t want to do this kind of work because of these threats and harassment that they’re dealing with. And in addition to that, they’re losing the institutional knowledge. There’s a lot of minutiae that are involved in election administration. Every state in this country has a different way that they administer these elections. So the Brennan Center is concerned about that.”

“And I would also just add to that 80 percent of these election workers in this country are female. So part of the reason that we were focused on this story is because we’ve been tracking how disinformation is impacting women over at Scripps News. We’ve been kind of doing a series on this. And this is really impacting election workers because so many of them are women across the country, Allie.”

“Really great reporting, Liz. It’s going to have a long tail as we go into the 2024 election cycle. Thank you for tracking it and thank you for bringing it to us.”

That’s exactly the solution, yes. If you’ve never posted before, and you make a comment that gets a few downvotes, your comment is removed, and you get a polite note saying that you don’t have enough interactions to be able to post yet. A lot of subreddits do exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reason.

I still don’t have that part of the system worked out, because it’s only come up a couple of times. It hasn’t even happened enough to give a good test run to the code. I’ve been tweaking the code every time it comes up, because it’s not quite right yet, but it’s been happening so rarely that it’s not even really an issue. It would have been easier to moderate the throwaway comments by hand, to be honest.

Oh no! It hadn’t occurred to me that excluding unpopular opinions might be a problem. If only I’d thought of that, I might have looped in some other people, talked extensively about the problem and carefully watched how it was working in practice and tweaked it until it seemed like it was striking the right balance. I might have erred heavily on the side of allowing people to speak to the point that I was constantly fielding complaints from people wanting me to remove something they said shouldn’t be allowed.

And furthermore, you’re right. If this catches on then lemmy.ml might be able to silence dissenting views. That would be terrible.

I don’t see anything about preventing corporate landlords from buying it all and renting it back to us.

Everyone played their part, I’m sure.

And yes, it’s funny as hell. That’s why I wanted to spread the word!

I almost let it happen, so I could post this after the fact. It would have been much funnier, but I wasn’t sure about the implications of banning thousands of users one by one, probably including myself and the bot.

They’re still neck and neck, with the bot still just barely behind the highest-ranked user.

Edit: I swear to God, this just happened as I was typing this message: MediaBiasFactChecker is now lower-ranked than the negative of the highest user. We’ve crossed the threshold.

The source is the video. I found a news story about the event, but it was cringey, so I decided the video spoke for itself.

Oh no, my MeowMeowBeanz!

That’s fair.

Like I said, I think this is a borderline case. The comment in question could be concisely expressing a political viewpoint about your posting and how it relates to a growing movement in American politics to give harsh criticism to Democratic politicians in ways that, intentionally or not, give aid and comfort to a takeover of the system by elements that are an existential threat to everybody in the US, on every side. Or, it could be just content-free hostility. It’s hard to tell, and since the poster in general is a certified non-jerk, I erred on the side of leaving it. But I can understand the other side of it, absolutely.

A handful of people gave me reports that your postings were “unpleasant,” which I objected to in order to protect your right to say what you want. I feel the same way about someone who has a generally good posting record coming in and being Zionist or leaving a bluntly rude comment about the topic of an article.

I get it. You’re not wrong. I think it might be worth me adding an entry to the FAQ, along the lines of:

Q: This isn’t pleasant!

A: “Pleasant” was the wrong word. People will sometimes say things you find unpleasant, potentially more so than on Lemmy usually, since the human moderation is lighter. That’s by design. Many Lemmy communities contain a large amount of content which is “polite” or “civil” but which in the aggregate is detracting significantly from the experience. I do plan to allow content which is offensive, up to a certain point, as long as it doesn’t become a dominant force.

The theory is that we’re all adults, and we can handle an occasional rude comment or viewpoint we don’t like. If someone is a habitual line-stepper, then they will get escorted to the door, but part of the whole point is that the good actors can be free of a moderator looking over their shoulder on every comment deciding whether or not they’re allowed to say it.

That’s not to mean this is a “free speech” community. If content that’s offensive for the sake of offensiveness starts to proliferate, then I’ll probably put rules into place to address it. But you will find content that is not “pleasant.”

What do you think?