this post was submitted on 15 Sep 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.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by auk to c/santabot
 

The steady stream of people who are telling me that the Santa moderation bot is going to delete anyone who's downvoted or disagrees with the group, is continuing unabated.

Here's an olive branch: You've got a point. It's just a black box and I juggle the parameters to some secret process to ban the people who got some downvotes, I can understand how that comes across as toxic. I might or might not be lying about taking careful time to look over its judgements and make sure that I think the impact is more positive than negative, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. You still have to trust my intentions and trust the bot to make good decisions, and trusting that to an automated system rarely works out well.

To me, delegating the moderation of the community to the segment of that community that's trusted and consistently upvoted by the rest of us is better than giving it to a handful of people who wield unilateral power according to random rules. I like the bot's judgements most of the time when I look at them. The question is simply whether this algorithm is actually doing that delegation effectively, or if it's just banhammering anyone who gets a couple of downvotes. I'm confident that it's doing the first thing almost all of the time.

In talks behind the scenes with other moderators, I've been going into a lot of detail about specific users and going back and forth about judgements. I also do a ton of checking behind the scenes. I don't want to do that publicly. I think it would be deeply informative to post a list of the "top ten" and "bottom ten" users, and go into detail about why the low-ranked users got where they are, but that's probably not a good idea.

What I would like to do is share that information on some level, so that people can see what's going on, instead of it being me relaying that everything's good. It's tough because I can't break down every level of detail without invading all kinds of people's privacy. That said, I do think that there's a way to be found to open up the process so people can see and give input to what's going on.

One happy medium I could do would be to have the bot post its spot-check automatically about once a week. It could pick out one random user who's barely on the borderline, and post a couple of the worst comments they made. Usually, when I'm messing around with its parameters, that's what I am trying to do. There are some comments that are clearly toxicity that have no business anywhere. There are some comments that are clearly free speech, and even if they're getting downvotes, they deserve to be heard. Then there are some comments that are on the borderline between. My goal is to set up the parameters so that the borderline rank value for a ban matches up with the users who are on that borderline.

I can see some upsides and downsides to posting that publicly. What do people think, though? What would you want to see, in order to make an informed decision about what you think of this whole approach?

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[โ€“] Five 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Is there a cap to how much stomp a user can have through their votes? By accumulating enough zeitgeist points, can a single user ban a new user from !pleasantpolitics with downvotes?

[โ€“] auk 2 points 3 months ago

There's not a cap. That type of activity is, in fact, a classical failure mode of this type of network. Just like people learned to build link farms to artificially give page rank to fake pages, people can learn to farm for zeitgeist points to then give or take away rank from some targeted user. That is one reason I'm being cagey about giving away introspection tools or detailed road maps of people's points. I don't want to facilitate someone getting feedback about how well an effort like that is working.

I'm a little more concerned about people accumulating points and then upvoting a troll account to make sure it doesn't get banned, than I am about people downvote-bombing someone they disagree with to ban them. They are both concerns, though. There are ways around both through tweaks to the algorithm, but I've constantly been surprised about how the tools work out in practice as compared to my theory about them, and so I'm waiting until it happens before I start messing with solutions to it. I do have some ideas in mind for how to deal with it. I am guessing that in the long run, it won't be too big an issue, but I want to see how it works out in practice before actualizing the countermeasures I was thinking of.