[email protected] is live! If you missed the previous discussion, it’s a community with a robot moderator that bans you if the community doesn’t like your comments, even if you’re not “breaking the rules.” The hope is to have a politics community without the arguing. [email protected] has an in-depth explanation of how it works.
I was trying to keep the algorithm a secret, to make it more difficult to game the system, but the admins convinced me that basically nobody would participate if they could be banned by a secret system they couldn’t know anything about. I posted the code as open source. It works like PageRank, by aggregating votes and assigning trust to users based on who the community trusts and banning users with too low a trust level.
I’ve also rebalanced the tuning of the algorithm and worked on it more. It now bans a tiny number of users (108 in total right now), but still including a lot of obnoxious accounts. There are now no slrpnk users banned. It’s a lot of lemmy.world people, a few from lemmy.ml or lemm.ee, and a scattering from other places.
Check it out! Let me know what you think.
I really did worry about this a lot. I wasn’t kidding that your user is a perfect test case. A human moderator could look at one of those comments and say you’re just stirring up trouble, but in my opinion that’s a valid viewpoint even if I don’t agree with it, that someone should still be allowed to say.
By the same token, if that’s all someone wants to post, then it’s a way different story and they should probably be banned. I very much like the property that you can effectively earn the right to say what you want by posting productive things. So, if you want to make a troll account, you have to post a bunch of productive content to shield your disruptive content from moderation… at which point the result is a bunch of productive content and a handful of disruptive comments, which is probably a net victory for the community anyway.