Some people have been accusing me of creating this bot so I can manifest a one-viewpoint echo chamber. They tell me that they already know that I’m trying to create an echo chamber, anything I say otherwise is a lie, and they’re not interested in talking about the real-world behavior of the bot, even when I offer to fix anything that seems like a real echo chamber effect that it’s creating.

I don’t think it’s creating an echo chamber. We’ve had a Zionist, an opponent of US imperialism, a lot of centrists, some never-Bideners, some fact checking, and one “fuck you.” The code to delete downvoted comments from throwaway accounts is pretty much working, but it’s only been triggered once. Someone said Mike Johnson’s ears were ugly and that made him a bad person, which everyone hated and downvoted, so the bot deleted it since the person that said it didn’t have other recent history to be able to use to categorize them. I sent the user a note explaining how the throwaway detection works.

I want to list out the contentious topics from the week, and how I judge the bot’s performance and the result for each one, to see if the community agrees with me about how things are looking:

Biden’s supreme court changes

I like the performance here. The pleasant comments have a diversity of opinion, but people aren’t fighting or shouting their opinions back and forth at each other. The lemmy.world section looks argumentative and low-quality.

Blue MAGA

I don’t love the one-sidedness of the pleasant comments section. It’s certainly more productive with less argumentation, which is good, but there are only two representatives of one of the major viewpoints chiming in, which starts to sound like an attempt at an echo chamber.

I read the lemmy.world version for a while, and I started to think the result here is acceptable. The pleasant version still has people who have every ability to speak up for the minority viewpoint, but it was limited to people who were being coherent about it, and giving reasons. A lot of the people who spoke up in the lemmy.world version, on both sides, were combative and got engaged in long hostile exchanges, without listening or backing up what they were saying. That’s what I don’t want.

Biden’s Palestine policy

I don’t love “fuck you.” I debated whether it was protected political speech expressing a viewpoint on the article, or a personal attack, and I couldn’t decide, so I left it up. For one thing, I think it’s good to err on the side of letting people say what they want to the admins, to bend over backwards just slightly to avoid a situation where some users or their viewpoints are more special, or shielded from firm disagreement, than others. And yes, I recognize the irony.

This one is my least favorite comments section. The user who’s engaging in a hostile exchange of short messages has a lot of “rank” to be able to say what they want, and the current model assumes that since people generally like their comments, they should be allowed to speak their mind. The result, however, is starting to look combative to me. It’s still far better than the exchanges from lemmy.world, but I don’t love it.

What does everyone else think? I don’t know if anyone but me cares about these issues in this depth, but I’m interested in hearing any feedback.

  • auk@slrpnk.netOPM
    1·
    2 months ago

    Really? I am surprised. I agree with your categories, but when I examine the comments sections, it looks like the removal of group one is moving people from group four into group three, and giving them space to talk with each other and disagree without the entire environment being so combative that it becomes impossible to do so.

    The final comments section example is not ideal, but it’s also not an echo chamber. The lemmy.ml version of the comments section is better, which is a problem, but none of the users from the lemmy.ml comments are banned in [email protected], so I think the problem is cultural and not technical. I do agree with the need to protect the minority opinions from getting ganged up on by group four, but outside that one post I don’t see it happening at all, and everyone’s still welcome to say what they want.

    There’s also a key distinction within group two. Users who post only opinions that are in group two are likely to be banned. The users for which I disagree with the bot’s decision almost all fit into this category. There is a large group, however, that can post opinions in group two alongside a healthy amount of positive engagement on other topics. I convinced myself that the result was okay, since most of the users that I looked at, I had to admit seemed to be engaging almost exclusively according to their chosen single issue or group of issues, and not with a balanced set of views of which some were popular and some not.

    I do worry about this issue. I keep waiting for someone to bring up a specific user that is, for example, in group two, who is being banned even though their engagement is a clear net positive for the community. But so far, I’ve unearthed far more of those and fretted about them than anyone has sent to me. At the end of the day, I decided that aiming for perfection was impossible, and that as long as the comments seem to display a diversity of opinion and positive engagement, that was good enough to be a place to start.

    Can you think of a good post to bait group four into coming in and overwhelming the comments? Or do you think these existing test cases are already showing that? It would be difficult for this approach to totally prevent that problem, without a lot of moderator intervention to enforce a productiveness standard for each comment, but gathering data about the problem can still be a good thing.