I don’t see anything wrong with mod bots. I don’t advocate their use in an ‘authoritarian role’, but they can be used for things like preventing duplicate posts, making posts fit guidelines, removing spam, etc. They’re just a tool to make moderation easier, it doesn’t change anything about the way a community is moderated.

Found the luddite, I guess.

The point of automods is to take really simple and repetitive tasks from the human moderators. For example, in one community the moderators spend a lot of time locking duplicate posts.

So for example, there’s a cool news post, and over the next few days different people are creating multiple posts linking to the same article instead of searching whether someone else already posted the same thing. Double posts like that suck a bit, since they fracture the discussion, making it hard to follow what’s been said. They also decrease the visibility and split the audience between multiple posts containing the same content.

Currently, they have to manually search for and close these double posts, which is both annoying, takes time and is frustrating. An automod can automatically detect these posts, comment with a link to the original post and lock the duplicate ones.

Back on Reddit some mods use bots to detect frequently asked questions and automatically post a response linking to an FAQ thread. This would be possible here as well.

There is no AI or any kind of judgement built in the bot. It doesn’t use heuristics or anything. Just really simple rules (currently duplicate detection and regex) to automate the judgement of the mods.

I think you are anthropomorphizing this little script far too much.

Have you ever moderated somewhere of any significant size?

I was once a mod on a 500k+ user subreddit on Reddit. Without AutoMod, the place would go to shit within a month. AutoMod caught so many things that would otherwise disrupt the community.

It’s not “authoritarian” to automatically remove posts of people spamming the N-word, especially when you can easily tell the users are trolls. Nor is it “authoritarian” to remove spammers trying to shill their T-shirts or sending links to scam websites. Or those annoying bots that would copy user comments and then try to pose as “real” users so they could build up karma and get around spam filters easier.

At a certain point, it is impossible to keep up with everything happening in your community. While reports are important, mods do have to sleep. We do have lives, and we don’t pay attention to the communities we help run for every waking moment of our days.

If I wanted to ban every person who used the letter “e”, I could do that without a bot. A modbot makes it easier, but simply having a tool available doesn’t make the person using that tool more or less authoritarian. Not to mention both Kbin and Lemmy have open moderation logs, so you can easily see if a place has a moderation style you disagree with.