Some people have been accusing me of creating this bot so I can manifest a one-viewpoint echo chamber. They tell me that they already know that I'm trying to create an echo chamber, anything I say otherwise is a lie, and they're not interested in talking about the real-world behavior of the bot, even when I offer to fix anything that seems like a real echo chamber effect that it's creating.
I don't think it's creating an echo chamber. We've had a Zionist, an opponent of US imperialism, a lot of centrists, some never-Bideners, some fact checking, and one "fuck you." The code to delete downvoted comments from throwaway accounts is pretty much working, but it's only been triggered once. Someone said Mike Johnson's ears were ugly and that made him a bad person, which everyone hated and downvoted, so the bot deleted it since the person that said it didn't have other recent history to be able to use to categorize them. I sent the user a note explaining how the throwaway detection works.
I want to list out the contentious topics from the week, and how I judge the bot's performance and the result for each one, to see if the community agrees with me about how things are looking:
Biden's supreme court changes
- lemmy.world politics: https://slrpnk.net/post/11494089
- Pleasant politics: https://slrpnk.net/post/11493478
I like the performance here. The pleasant comments have a diversity of opinion, but people aren't fighting or shouting their opinions back and forth at each other. The lemmy.world section looks argumentative and low-quality.
Blue MAGA
- lemmy.world politics: https://slrpnk.net/post/11475921
- Pleasant politics: https://slrpnk.net/post/11487313
I don't love the one-sidedness of the pleasant comments section. It's certainly more productive with less argumentation, which is good, but there are only two representatives of one of the major viewpoints chiming in, which starts to sound like an attempt at an echo chamber.
I read the lemmy.world version for a while, and I started to think the result here is acceptable. The pleasant version still has people who have every ability to speak up for the minority viewpoint, but it was limited to people who were being coherent about it, and giving reasons. A lot of the people who spoke up in the lemmy.world version, on both sides, were combative and got engaged in long hostile exchanges, without listening or backing up what they were saying. That's what I don't want.
Biden's Palestine policy
- Pleasant politics: https://slrpnk.net/post/11518516
I don't love "fuck you." I debated whether it was protected political speech expressing a viewpoint on the article, or a personal attack, and I couldn't decide, so I left it up. For one thing, I think it's good to err on the side of letting people say what they want to the admins, to bend over backwards just slightly to avoid a situation where some users or their viewpoints are more special, or shielded from firm disagreement, than others. And yes, I recognize the irony.
This one is my least favorite comments section. The user who's engaging in a hostile exchange of short messages has a lot of "rank" to be able to say what they want, and the current model assumes that since people generally like their comments, they should be allowed to speak their mind. The result, however, is starting to look combative to me. It's still far better than the exchanges from lemmy.world, but I don't love it.
What does everyone else think? I don't know if anyone but me cares about these issues in this depth, but I'm interested in hearing any feedback.
The bot reads a large number of communities to form its decisions, including those. It only actively moderates !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net.
Is this community coming across as a The_Donald equivalent?
Pushback is fine and encouraged. I intended for people to be able to talk to each other, whether or not it's friendly.
Yes. The moderation model on political Lemmy is strange to me. I think we can let people post, and kick out the obvious trolls and bad actors, and leave the rest of the people to sort it out, because we're not jerks. The incredible list of rules and procedures for being allowed by the moderators to post, in most communities, applied to the jerks and the normals alike, doesn't seem to line up very well with what will create a good community.
That was how I decided to interpret it, which is why I left it up. Can you see how it could be interpreted as personal to the poster and short on details, though?
I think everyone has a hair trigger right now on this topic. The article was inflammatory. Your response was inflammatory. In most of political Lemmy, that spirals into people giving short hostile responses to each other, and it spills out across the comments and creates a giant hostile spiral. That didn't happen here, but I am trying to keep a close eye on how things are working.
Say what you want.
I think I need to rename the community to something like "asshole politics." It's supposed to be useful. It's not supposed to be friendly or need to be pleasant. All I was saying in the DM to you was that I thought what you said was potentially too short and hostile to be as useful as it could be, not that I as a moderator was telling you you weren't allowed to do it.