this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Santabot

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Santabot is an automated moderation tool, designed to reduce moderation load and remove bad actors in a way that is transparent to all and mostly resistant to abuse and evasion.

This is a community devoted to meta discussion for the bot.

founded 5 months ago
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  1. It would be extraordinarily easy to bot it and just silence anyone you want.
  2. I agree, moderation is absolutely necessary to maintaine civil discussion, but silencing people, because they have unpopular opinions, is a really bad idea.
  3. I love lemmy because it is the ultimate embodiment of decentralised free speech. This destroys that.
  4. If I were a bad actor, hypothetically, let's just say lammy.ml or haxbear and I decided I wanted to silence anyone who disagrees with what I have to say. Then I could just make a fork of this project to only value my instances votes and censor anyone who doesn't agree with what my community thinks.
  5. This tool simply acts as a force multiplier for those who want to use censorship as a tool for mass silencing of descent.

Yes, I've read the Q&A, But I can simply think of more ways to abuse this bot for bad than it can be used for good.

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[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I think that's the key, votes moderate comments and posts in terms of sorting. They don't moderate it in terms of outright silencing an opinion or idea.

  1. I'm assuming that the voting is based on all accounts across all instances, so it's not just your instance whose account creation rules matter, it's all instances across the Fediverse, right?
  2. I think ultimately people vote based on preconceived biases more than they will on the validity of an argument or its facts. I'd definitely love to see some data on how the experiment plays out. It'd be quite interesting if we could get that in full.
  3. I guess not necessarily free speech but more marketplace of ideas. I guess my main concern here is that it will get implemented across the Fediverse without Admins and moderators thinking about the long-term effects of such a system.
  4. I prefer instances that have a more open policy in terms of defederation. I feel this tool could provide people who are willing to go to the lengths of vote manipulation, direct moderation capabilities without having to be a moderator in the community itself. Hence, I believe this would lead to instances with more open federation policies being more susceptible to manipulation by extremists.
  5. Sure, but by the misuse of this tool I can affect the moderation of an individual on a community that I don't have any moderation powers in.

I definitely think it's an interesting experiment that's worth running. But I'm hesitant to see what the outcomes of it will be if it gains mass adoption.