Santa is a robot moderator. Santa will decide if youâre 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 someoneâs 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. Thatâs 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 donât 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 wonât 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 wasnât pleasant!
A: âPleasantâ 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. Thatâs by design. Many Lemmy communities contain a large amount of content which is âpoliteâ or âcivilâ 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 doesnât become a dominant force.
The theory is that weâre all adults, and we can handle an occasional rude comment or viewpoint we donât 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 theyâre allowed to say it.
Thatâs not to mean this is a âfree speechâ community. If content thatâs offensive for the sake of offensiveness starts to proliferate, then Iâll probably put rules into place to address it. But you will find content that is not âpleasant.â
Q: Why was my comment deleted?
A: Sorry. If you havenât posted a lot in the recent past, but youâve been getting some downvotes, the bot will err on the side of caution and not let you post. This isnât a perfect solution, since it starts to verge on removing unpopular viewpoints, but itâs necessary to protect the community from malicious content from throwaway accounts.
If you donât have a lot of recent activity in your account, but youâve 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.
Itâs 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%, itâs 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, itâs 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 youâre 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 youâre not convincing very many people of what youâre saying.
If youâre not willing to hear those suggestions and simply want to insist that itâs 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 donât 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 othersâ opinions, and contribute constructively. Santabotâs 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. Thereâs a more detailed description of the algorithm there, or you can look at the code.
Q: Wonât this create an echo chamber?
A: It might. I looked at its moderation decisions a lot and itâs surprisingly tolerant of unpopular opinions as long as theyâre 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 youâre only posting your unpopular opinion, or you tend to get in arguments about it, then thatâs 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 personâs ability to stand up for it, is going to be censored, post a comment below with your concerns, and we can talk. Itâs a fair concern, and there might be cases where itâs justified, and the botâs behavior needs to be adjusted. Without some particular case to reference, though, itâs impossible to address the concern, so please be specific if you want to do this.
Q: Wonât 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 botâs decisions about aboveboard users being wrong all that often.
Q: Why doesnât the bot notify for bans?
There are a few users who get banned or unbanned very day, as the pattern of user comments and votes changes over time. Itâs important that bans be âlightweight,â and always reversible for anyone who is banned. Itâs not a heavy thing like most Lemmy moderation. It already bothers me that the flow of bans creates spam in the modlog. I donât want to amplify that to DM spam across all of Lemmy.
I did have functionality at one point to notify for certain situations, and it triggered once, and that user complained to me that my bot was notifying them about a ban in a community they had never heard of and didnât care about at all. I think they were right to complain. I donât want to send out spam. Multiplying that interaction by 100 user actions per month isnât something I want to do.
I do want to make sure itâs transparent to people why they are banned, and what they can do to get unbanned, if it comes up. If anyone has any ideas about how I can make it more clear to people who do try to post and find they are banned, that they are banned and why, Iâm open to the suggestion. Iâve tried to do this, but I found that the people who are banned arenât interested in any reasonable conversation about any of that, so I doubt that anything I could do on my end would make it work any better. You have to be very unreasonable for the bot to blacklist you outright.
What do you think?
It may sound like Iâve got it all figured out, but I donât 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. Iâm curious what the community thinks.
Thank you!
Good to know about that issue with the weight. I guess I need to stick better to the âdown-vote etiquetteâ as by our CoC.
I wouldnât 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. Thatâs why
SMOOTHING_FACTOR
is 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 âpro-solarpunkâ judgement than the other way.