Your grandchildren are going to live on a planet that’s an unrecognizable hellscape compared to the paradise you and I were born into. If they survive. I don’t think these people are planning to destroy any artifacts during soup night. They are trying to organize to do what they can to stop it, or reduce the damage. You should too.
I don’t want to go into any detail on how it works. Your message did inspire me, though, to offer to explain and demonstrate it for one of the admins so there isn’t this air of secrecy. The point is that I don’t want the details to be public and make it easier to develop ways around it, not that I’m the only one who is allowed to know what it is doing.
I’ll say that it draws all its data from the live database of a normal instance, so it’s not fetching or storing any data other than what every other Lemmy instance does anyway. It doesn’t even keep its own data aside from a little stored scratch pad of its judgements, and it doesn’t feed comment data to any public APIs in a way that would give users’ comments over to be used as training data by God knows who.
Other things that have occurred to me in the meantime:
Perfectly reasonable. It’s not feeding any users’ comments into any LLM public API like OpenAI that might use them for training the model in the future. As a matter of face it’s not communicating with any API or web service, just self contained on the machine that runs it.
As far as transparency, I completely get it. I would hope that the offer to point to specific reasons for any user that wants to ask questions about why they can’t post will help to alleviate that, but it won’t make it completely go away. Especially because as I said, I’m expecting that it will get its decisions wrong some small percentage of the time. I just know there’s an arms race between moderation tooling and people trying to get around the moderation tooling, and I don’t want to give the bad actors any legs up in that competition even if there are very valid reasons for it in terms of giving people reasons to trust that the system is honest.
Yes, this is an attempt at something similar. I think the reality is that when things grow beyond a certain size you have to do some automated moderation things or else it gets overwhelming for the mods. This is an attempt at a new model for that, since I think human moderation of everything has a couple of different flaws, and some of the automated things reddit did had glaring flaws.
Yes. That probing on the part of bad actors is part of why I don’t want to explain anything about how it works even though that raises massive transparency questions. I’m happy to point out a message to any particular person who has a question and say “Here is the kind of thing you did, that you can’t do anymore if you want to post here,” but I definitely don’t want to draw out a little roadmap for how to trick the bot.
Mostly the process is for the 95% of people that it is fine with to just talk as they want to, and for anyone that’s in the 5% to have an avenue to ask reasonable questions, and then run the experiment, and see what happens.
And yes, I’ll certainly abide by whatever your decision is about whether this is the place to try it out. Making it about news in general (bringing that to slrpnk without the bickering that comes with it whenever anything political comes in) sounds like it might be a real positive for the instance. Making it about politics (as I did in my original pitch), now that I think about it, sounds a little bit wrong. But let me know what you and everyone thinks.
My vision is that if some person is unable to post, and wants to post asking why, I can give them some sort of answer (similar to what I said to Alice in another message here). The ban decision is never permanent, either, it’s just based on the user’s recent and overall posting history. If you want to be on the whitelist, there’s specific guidance on what you “did wrong” so to speak, and if you decide the whole thing is some mod overreach one viewpoint whitewash and you want no part of it, that’s okay too. My hope is that it winds up being a pleasant place to discuss politics without being oppressive to anyone’s freedom of speech or coming across as arbitrary or bad, but that is why I want to try the experiment. Maybe the bot in practice turns out to be a capricious asshole and people decide that it (and me) are not worth dealing with.
The whole model is more of a private club model (we’ll let you in but you have to be nice), different from the current moderation model. The current implementation would want to exclude about 200 users altogether. Most are from lemmy.world or lemmy.ml (And 3 from slrpnk. I haven’t investigated what those people did that it didn’t like.)
Specific answers to your questions:
I thought about calling the bot “unfairbot”, just to prime people for the idea that it’s going to make unfair decisions sometimes. Part of the idea is that because it’s not a person making personal decisions, it can be much more heavy handed at tone policing than any human moderator could be without being a total raging oppressive jerk.
I know, I was just trying to give a frame of reference for what the level of ban-worthiness would be.
So you’re okay if I try this experiment? Looking now at how it might play out, I admit I’m having second thoughts about whether it’s even a good fit for this instance. Maybe something would be better like “pleasant news,” where people can post news stories even about political or geopolitical topics, but the actors who like to turn the comments into a war zone are removed to a much lower level. Tell me what you think, though, and I also want to think about it a little bit more.
All good. I am chuffed that you were good-natured about it.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
I had not anticipated “Oh shit that’s a good point I should apply for a job with McKinsey” to be a takeaway that anyone would have to this post, let alone the assumed main takeaway from it.
Not that the line starting to go down would represent positive progress on climate change. It would mean only less new damage with every passing year, a smaller progress in worsening the catastrophe that’s already well in motion. But the fact that the line isn’t even going down illustrates the catastrophic absurdity of claiming that we’re making tangible progress with existing policies.
The home we all live is on fire, and we’re still lighting new blazes, while congratulating ourselves that we’re meeting our targets.
I had this exact same question and it led to me starting [email protected] / [email protected] as an attempt at a solution. It’s already pointed me to a few good ones.
There are also some pretty fantastic ideas in this thread, which I plan to post as new threads there.
:-D
I expected Biden to be pretty bad, just because he’s a rich white guy who’s been in politics all his life and the Democrats are usually pretty bad. I voted for him originally mainly just because he wouldn’t try to kill all the Mexicans or re-invade Vietnam or put trans people in prison or whatever like Trump would, basically your point of view in this message.
He surprised me. I couldn’t see Hilary Clinton forgiving student loan debt or pausing LNG exports or making these pitifully small sanctions on a pitifully small number of Israelis which is still better than most US presidents’ “here’s some more patriot missiles and rockets God bless your killing” approach to Israel. He’s still pretty far from what I would like to have, but I expected pure bullshit and he’s better than average. You’re not required to agree, but that’s how I see it.
Fun stuff.
Yes, Trump will absolutely threaten trans people’s safety in addition to being far more encouraging than Biden is with massacring Arabs. That’s not “using as a shield,” that’s just what’s up. Of course you already know this.
What if Bernie Sanders might get elected in the primary, but I decide there’s an element of his platform that I don’t like, and I stay home in protest instead of voting, and Biden wins the primary instead? Am I, then, a selfish piece of shit?
I feel like I just asked you this: Are you under the impression that I somehow have the ability to choose who wins the primaries?
I have one vote and you have one vote. My ability to affect the primaries is equal to yours. There are systems of media that conspire to make it tough for a person other than pro-corporate trash to win the primaries, but why are you talking to me like that’s my fault? And why are you saying that if the wrong person wins, then staying home to put in office an even worse person is going to help solve the problem?
I appreciate it. You are welcome to reuse it, if you like it. I’m just pissed off at the absolute self-defeating absurdity of these arguments and how self-righteously these people are screeching them. Welcome to the internet, I guess.
Stop electing pro-corporate trash in the primaries.
Are you under the impression that somehow I have the ability to elect different people in the primaries, and I’m just choosing not to?
The motive is unclear
Not to me it isn’t.
For what it’s worth, I completely agree that threatening historical artifacts to get people’s attention is counterproductive. I looked over Just Stop Oil and I don’t agree with all of their tactics. Promoting some other type of action sounds better, to me.
But on the other hand at least they are doing something. If 10% of the world cared as much as they do, we’d have a much better chance of taking effective action against the apocalypse that’s coming. As it stands right now, billions will die. We probably can’t avoid that anymore, but we can reduce the number of billions, and the quality of the wreckage we’ll get to inhabit in 100 years.
You can:
To me, I think doing one of the first three makes more sense than the fourth one. Again, I won’t say you’re wrong, but less involvement in doing anything is not the solution to it.