Santa is a robot moderator. Santa will decide if you’re naughty or nice. Santa has no chill.
Hi everyone!
The slrpnk admins were nice enough to let me try a little moderation experiment. I made a moderation bot called Santa, which tries to ease the amount of busywork for moderators, and reduce the level of unpleasantness in conversations.
If someone’s interactions are attracting a lot of downvotes compared to their upvotes, they are probably not contributing to the community, even if they are not technically breaking any rules. That’s the simple core of it. Then, on top of that, the bot gives more weight to users that other people upvote frequently, so it is much more accurate than simply adding up the up and down vote totals. In testing, it seemed to do a pretty good job figuring out who was productive and not.
Most people upvote more than they downvote. To accumulate a largely negative opinion from the community, your content has to be very dislikable. The current configuration bans less than 3% of the users that it evaluates, but there are some vocal posters in that 3%, which is the whole point.
It is currently live and moderating [email protected]. It is experimental. Please don’t test it by posting bad content there. If you have a generally good posting history, it will probably let you get away with being obnoxious, and it won’t be a good test. Test it by posting good things that you think will attract real-life jerks, and let it test its banhammer against them instead of you.
FAQ
Q: I just saw content that wasn’t pleasant!
A: “Pleasant” was the wrong word for the test community. People will sometimes say things you find unpleasant, potentially more so, 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 total 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 shown 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.”
Q: Why was my comment deleted?
A: Sorry. If you haven’t posted a lot in the recent past, but you’ve been getting some downvotes, the bot will err on the side of caution and not let you post. This isn’t a perfect solution, since it starts to verge on removing unpopular viewpoints, but it’s necessary to protect the community from malicious content from throwaway accounts.
If you don’t have a lot of recent activity in your account, but you’ve posted some unpopular things, Santa may come after you. It may not be fair. The best thing to do is to post productively and actively outside of controversial topics, wait a few days, and try again.
Q: Why was I banned?
A: You may be a jerk. Sorry you had to find out this way.
It’s not hard to accumulate more weighted upvotes than downvotes. In the current configuration, 99% of the users on Lemmy manage it. If you are one of the 1%, it’s because you have enough posting history that the bot has observed a firm community consensus that your contributions are more negative than positive.
The bot is not making a decision about you. The community is. If you are banned, it’s because you are being downvoted overwhelmingly. The viewpoint you are expressing is probably not the issue. The Lemmy community is very tolerant of a wide variety of views. Some people may disagree with you and you may find that oppressive, but the bot will not ban you simply because some users argue with you when you say certain things. Those users are allowed to have their view, just like you have yours.
If you find you are banned and you’re willing to hear suggestions about how to present your argument without everyone downvoting you, leave a comment. Reducing your downvotes will help the bot recognize you as reasonable, but it will also probably help you get your point across more successfully. In order for the bot to ban you, you have to be received overwhelmingly negatively by the community, which probably means you’re not convincing very many people of what you’re saying.
If you’re not willing to hear those suggestions and simply want to insist that it’s everyone else that is the problem, the bot is being evil to you, your free speech is being infringed, and I am a tyrant if I don’t let you into the community to annoy everybody, I would respectfully request that you take it somewhere else.
Q: How long do bans last?
A: Bans are transient and based on user sentiment going back one month from the present day. If you have not posted much in the last month, even a single downvoted comment could result in a ban. If that happened to you, it should be easy to reverse the ban in a few days by engaging and posting outside of the moderated community, showing good faith and engagement, and bringing your average back up.
If you are at all a frequent poster on Lemmy and received a ban, you might have some negative rank in your average, and your ban may be indefinite until your habitual type of postings and interactions changes, and your previous interactions age past the one month limit.
Q: How can I avoid getting banned?
A: Engage positively with the community, respect others’ opinions, and contribute constructively. Santabot’s algorithm values the sentiment of trusted community members, so positive interactions are key.
If you want to hear examples of positive and negative content from your history, let me know and I can help. Pure voting totals are not always a good guideline to what the bot is reacting to.
Q: How does it work?
A: The code is in a Codeberg repository. There’s a more detailed description of the algorithm there, or you can look at the code.
Q: Won’t this create an echo chamber?
A: It might. I looked at its moderation decisions a lot and it’s surprisingly tolerant of unpopular opinions as long as they’re accompanied by substantial posting outside of the unpopular opinion. More accurately, the Lemmy community is surprisingly tolerant of a wide range of opinions, and that consensus is reflected when the bot parses the global voting record.
If you’re only posting your unpopular opinion, or you tend to get in arguments about it, then that’s going to be a problem, much more than someone who expresses an unusual opinion but still in a productive fashion or alongside a lot of normal interactions.
If you feel strongly that some particular viewpoint, or some particular person’s ability to stand up for it, is going to be censored, post a comment below with your concerns, and we can talk. It’s a fair concern, and there might be cases where it’s justified, and the bot’s behavior needs to be adjusted. Without some particular case to reference, though, it’s impossible to address the concern, so please be specific if you want to do this.
Q: Won’t people learn to fake upvotes for themselves and trick the bot?
A: They might. The algorithm is resistant to it but not perfectly. I am worried about that, to be honest, much more than about the bot’s decisions about aboveboard users being wrong all that often.
What do you think?
It may sound like I’ve got it all figured out, but I don’t think I do. Please let me know what you think. The bot is live on [email protected] so come along and give it a try. Post controversial topics and see if the jerks arrive and overwhelm the bot. Or, just let me know in the comments. I’m curious what the community thinks.
Thank you!
spoiler
There are so many problems with this.
- It would be extraordinarily easy to bot it and just silence anyone you want.
- I agree, moderation is absolutely necessary to maintaine civil discussion, but silencing people, because they have unpopular opinions, is a really bad idea.
- I love lemmy because it is the ultimate embodiment of decentralised free speech. This destroys that.
- 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.
- This tool simply acts as a force multiplier for those who want to use censorship as a tool for mass silencing of descent.
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.
What the hell dystopian meow meow beanz nonsense is this?
Oh no, my MeowMeowBeanz!
This is the shittiest bot ever
am i federating? get ready for me to test ur bot to the limmit
As I posted in the other thread, I’m very interested to see how this works out. I am definitely curious to see what the bot thinks of some of my posting habits if you are able to share that.
Sure. You have a pretty large amount of comments from the last month, pretty heavily voted on, with a ratio of about 2.7:1 positive rankings. This morning it needed to be 1:1 or more to post, and now I’ve changed it to be 2:1, but 2.7:1 is still well over the line.
Interactions it looks at highly positively are things like this:
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/9258523
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/9140065
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/9237926
Interactions it looks at highly negatively are things like this:
Your user is a great example of a hard situation for the bot to judge. To me, all five comments are perfectly reasonable. But you’re getting downvotes from some highly trusted users on the last two, so it counts them as negative things that are outweighed by the weight of other interactions you’ve had.
If someone was only posting things like the last two comments, would that be ban-worthy? To the bot it would be. I would probably agree with that in most cases, even though the comments are fine, since it’s indicative of a single-issue account, always getting in disagreements, which usually isn’t indicative of good things for the contribution level of that user. But it’s something to watch closely since ranking the last two comments negatively starts to smell like creating a single-viewpoint echo chamber.
I see this as it reaching a right judgement given pretty difficult data to interpret.
Hi! Nothing constructive to add right now, but I just wanted to counteract the negativity of comments here. I think it is a really interesting experiment and that we should embrace the possibilities that the fediverse give us in that respect, that may be actually eventually become the killer feature over centralized solutions.
Thank you. I’m not bothered by the negative comments. For a while, I was trying to demonstrate to those people that I’m working hard on making it resistant to the problems they’re talking about, but I eventually realized that they mostly have no interest in learning what’s going on, or a real exchange about real problems and solutions. I think they just want to yell. My explanation is there in the FAQ, to read if they want to, and if not, there’s not much to do.
Most of the people who have constructive concerns or criticisms phrase them in productive ways, and the conversation is fine. The people who are angrily denouncing my bot generally have no interest in finding out if their claims are true or worth worrying about, so I generally stopped paying attention to them.
How will this be audited to ensure fascists don’t game the down votes to quell pro-solarpunk, pro-liberation messaging?
Gaming the system is, I think, more unlikely than it might seem. In my auditing leading up to making it live, the problem was the opposite of that. The average fascist account, if it’s not banned outright, might have a “weight” of plus or minus single digits, whereas slrpnk admins might have a weight of several hundred. Some people were getting banned just because of a single downvote from one of the admins, applied to a reasonable comment, outweighed the whole community’s consensus.
I am watching the results, to some extent, and depending on good people who do receive moderation saying something if it seems unreasonable. I think it is possible to create a network of artificial votes to game the system, but you have to do a lot. It’s resistant to simply massively inserting fake votes from some random account to throw off the tally. You have to engineer artificial trust for yourself, and outweigh a community consensus of millions of votes. I think that, if it even takes off to the point that defeating it becomes a focal point, the level of voting that’s required to game the system will be large enough to be obvious during an audit.
Fantastic. Glad to know you thought about this
Good to know about that issue with the weight. I guess I need to stick better to the “down-vote etiquette” as by our CoC.
I wouldn’t stress about it too much. I played with the tuning and did more detailed spot checking of its judgements, like the examples I sent you in DM, until I agreed with its judgements almost all the time that I checked. That’s why
SMOOTHING_FACTORis so much higher now than it used to be, to reduce the influence of single high-profile accounts. I just meant that in my testing before I had a chance to tweak it extensively, the problem was more often an overly “pro-solarpunk” judgement than the other way.
