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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auk

Here's why I don't think this is a good idea. (lemm.ee)

submitted 4 months ago by muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee to c/santabot

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It would be extraordinarily easy to bot it and just silence anyone you want.
I agree, moderation is absolutely necessary to maintaine civil discussion, but silencing people, because they have unpopular opinions, is a really bad idea.
I love lemmy because it is the ultimate embodiment of decentralised free speech. This destroys that.
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.
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 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I spun up my own instance for that very reason as to not be fucking with some poor admin and am only federating with large instances (the ones u post and comment on) to avoid loading any small instances unnessasarilly.

[+] auk -195 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Your karma farm needs to be federated in order to work the way you want it to. It's not enough for your instance to federate with the world, that specific community also needs to.

I think I worked out a way to make it influence the vote bot rankings without polluting a real instance, but you'll need to redo all the votes so they federate out. I think it'll work fine if you just have all the vote bots undo their votes to each other, and then redo them. Give it a try.

[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ahh so the karma farm isnt federating? This is my first time running anything federated. If somone from ur instance subscribes to the karma farm community will that then federate it to ur instance and thus allow ur bot to count those votes?

[–] auk 2 points 2 months ago

Ahh so the karma farm isnt federating?

Yes, that's right. Communities are not federated except to instances that are subscribed to them.

Also, it only counts things going forward. When you subscribe to a community, you don't get the votes going back historically. You only get new votes from that point forward.

If somone from ur instance subscribes to the karma farm community will that then federate it to ur instance and thus allow ur bot to count those votes?

Yes. I've done a version of that now. If you have the bots in the karma farm make all new posts and mutual votes, then I should be able to pick it up now. The posts you made before won't take effect, because nothing was federating out at the time that you made them.