Every political thread is chock full of people being angry and unreasonable. I did some data mining, and most of the hate is coming from a very small percentage of the community, and the rest of the community is very consistent in downvoting them.
The problem is that even with human moderators enforcing a series of rules, most of those people are still in the comments making things miserable. So I made a bot to do it instead.
!santabot@slrpnk.net is a bot that uses an algorithm similar to PageRank to analyze the Lemmy community, and preemptively bans about 1-2% of posters, that consistently get a negative reaction a lot of the time. Take a look at an example of the early results. See how nice that is? It’s just people talking, and when they disagree, they say things like “clearly that part is wrong” and “your additions are good information though.”
It’s too early to tell how well it will work on a larger scale, but I’m hopeful. So, welcome to my experiment. Let’s talk politics without all the abusive people coming into the picture too. Please come in and test if this thing can work in the long run.
I think any experiment that could potentially filter out bad faith participants is at least worth a try. I participate in political discussions pretty infrequently, but when reading them I often see users jumping in with a ridiculous viewpoint that they are completely unwilling to discuss or hear any flaws about. That’s not conversation, that’s trying to shout others down, and I will be interested to see if that kind of behavior gets caught by your bot.
I know exactly what you mean. If I had to pick one type of comment that the bot is designed to ban for, those are them. It turns out to be pretty easy to do, too, because the community usually downvotes those comments very severely, even if the current moderation rules allow them even when someone does them 20 times a day.
Pick a name of someone you’ve seen do that, search the modlog on slrpnk.net, and I think you will find them banned by Santa. And, if they’re not, DM me their username, because there might be some corner case in the parameter tuning that I have missed.