this post was submitted on 17 Jul 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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Echo chambers and throwaway comment deletion (self.santabot)
submitted 1 month ago by auk to c/santabot
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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

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

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

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.

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[–] Five 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I do feel the community is trending towards an echo chamber. I think it is systemic, but I don't think it's intentional.

There's a version of the prisoner's dilemma that occurs in online debates. When both people argue in good faith and listen to each other, the discussion takes the most amount of time and mental effort, but there is also a feeling that the effort was not wasted. When one person is arguing in good faith while the other is engaging with low effort or trolling, the effort put into a good faith argument feels wasted. When both participants troll each other, nobody is seriously challenged, but neither of them waste very much time or mental effort in the process either.

This is meant to be an amoral framing of the situation. Time is limited, so time spent inventing novel arguments to convince an implacable enemy is time that could be spent doing something more effective, so trolling makes sense. Obviously when this approach is the dominant strategy in a forum, the space becomes toxic, anti-intellectual, and useless for evaluating the strength of ideas. I feel like you implicitly understand that, and are trying to create tools to make it easier to prevent that from happening.

Your tool is based on votes. People often vote for opinions they agree with, against those that they disagree with. Sometimes they vote for well-thought out arguments, and against low effort trolling. So your algorithm basically divides people into four groups. Group one are people who have both unpopular opinions and express them in toxic and low-effort ways. They are extremely likely to be banned algorithmically because they get both kinds of downvotes.

Group two are people who have unpopular opinions, but are good at expressing themselves in a way such that several people who don't agree with them still value their contribution. Your algorithm is likely to allow them to participate even with the tax of downvotes they get due to the unpopularity of their views. These people also make the most valuable contribution to a forum that is based on good faith discussion and debate, because if these people leave, you are left with the last two groups - three high effort popular opinion people, and four low effort popular opinion people. A space that includes primarily groups three and four together and excludes the other two is an echo chamber.

Group four is the problem. If they are allowed to participate in discussion without repercussions, they will eventually drive group two out, by either making them feel their time is being wasted so they leave, or by changing their strategy and joining group one. There is no simple algorithmic solution to this problem. I think your experiment has attracted a number of group two people due to the novelty of your experiment and the over-representation of anarchists on the instance you've chosen to host it, but they are not guaranteed to continue to participate. Lemmy.World is a pretty low bar to use as a measuring stick, but given the incentive structure at play, I think there is a real danger of falling below that standard unless the bot's algorithmic decisions are complemented by active human moderators who dis-incentivize and weed out people from group four.

[–] auk 1 points 1 month ago

Really? I am surprised. I agree with your categories, but when I examine the comments sections, it looks like the removal of group one is moving people from group four into group three, and giving them space to talk with each other and disagree without the entire environment being so combative that it becomes impossible to do so.

The final comments section example is not ideal, but it's also not an echo chamber. The lemmy.ml version of the comments section is better, which is a problem, but none of the users from the lemmy.ml comments are banned in !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net, so I think the problem is cultural and not technical. I do agree with the need to protect the minority opinions from getting ganged up on by group four, but outside that one post I don't see it happening at all, and everyone's still welcome to say what they want.

There's also a key distinction within group two. Users who post only opinions that are in group two are likely to be banned. The users for which I disagree with the bot's decision almost all fit into this category. There is a large group, however, that can post opinions in group two alongside a healthy amount of positive engagement on other topics. I convinced myself that the result was okay, since most of the users that I looked at, I had to admit seemed to be engaging almost exclusively according to their chosen single issue or group of issues, and not with a balanced set of views of which some were popular and some not.

I do worry about this issue. I keep waiting for someone to bring up a specific user that is, for example, in group two, who is being banned even though their engagement is a clear net positive for the community. But so far, I've unearthed far more of those and fretted about them than anyone has sent to me. At the end of the day, I decided that aiming for perfection was impossible, and that as long as the comments seem to display a diversity of opinion and positive engagement, that was good enough to be a place to start.

Can you think of a good post to bait group four into coming in and overwhelming the comments? Or do you think these existing test cases are already showing that? It would be difficult for this approach to totally prevent that problem, without a lot of moderator intervention to enforce a productiveness standard for each comment, but gathering data about the problem can still be a good thing.

[–] MrMakabar 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Generally speaking adding a filter for swear words, might be a good option. Certainly worth a try.

The other big problem seems to be that people only read the headline and not the article. There are some summary bots around for that, which might help as well. The Biden Palestine policy post headline makes it look like a "Biden=Trump" kind of article, which it is not. If the commentors actually read the article, that would lead to very different comments.

[–] auk 1 points 1 month ago

Yes. This is what @Five@slrpnk.net is calling group four, and I agree that it's a problem.

It might work for me to manually moderate lazy or combative comments, but that does enter into a dynamic where I'm manually deciding which comments are good enough to stay and which aren't. I want to avoid doing that.

I do agree with you. The comments on that post aren't great.

[–] solo 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

The way I see things, an effort to have conversations in good faith around politics is a necessity, and it has nothing to do with an echo chamber. On the contrary they are the basis of personal and community growth. If a bot could help towards this direction, I think it's great.

Also, from what is written in the side bar of Pleasant Politics, it seems to me that it is clear that Santabot is an experiment. It might work, might work to a point or not. I think it is worth giving this experiment some more time. And thank you for trying this out, as well as including us users in this conversation.

[–] auk 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I wish that I had chosen a different name. "Pleasant" gives people the wrong idea. You're supposed to be exposed to viewpoints you think are unpleasant, as long as you can agree not to be a jerk about it when you talk about them.

[–] solo 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

What about changing the name in a way that is a bit more descriptive? Something like:

Pleasant blablabla for blabla Politics

(obviously I don't have a specific suggestion, just a structure proposition, for now at least)

Edit: Maybe part of it could be what you just said. Pleasant exposure to unpleasant viewpoints on Politics? Hmmm..now that I think about it, not too sure if the specific suggestion actually works, but I'm sure you get my point!

[–] auk 1 points 1 month ago

Let's call it /c/jerks and cut right to the chase. /s

I think /c/politics may have been better. "Pleasant" is only confusing everybody.

[–] Five 2 points 1 month ago

I looks like I posted a reply the same minute you did. Thanks for doing these updates and check-ins.

I'll probably have more to say later when I have more time to write.

[–] Five 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I don't have a problem with "bad language" - I think it's entirely appropriate to say fuck sometimes. My problem with the comment is its context and its subtext. But before I unpack that, I think we should talk about something else first.

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.

Saying "fuck you" to an American cop is protected political speech, and you should expect to be protected under the First Amendment. Saying "fuck you" to a cashier at a Wendy's is not, and there is no constitutional prohibition that will prevent you from being escorted off the premises.

Could you speak a little more on what you mean by "protected political speech" as a criteria for moderation?

[–] auk 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If someone walks up to an American cop who's engaged in watching a protest, not otherwise doing anything, and yells, "fuck you," that's easy to interpret as a statement about policing and freedom of assembly in America. It's not personal to the cop. It's protected.

If someone is walking around handing out flyers about how the Democrats are a cult, and someone takes a look at the flyer, looks up, and yells, "fuck you," that's easy to interpret as a statement about the message the flyer is sending. I don't think it's personal to the person handing out flyers. If it proceeded from there into insulting the person directly or threatening them, or anything like that, it would become a personal attack, but as is, I thought it was easy to interpret as a reaction directed at the message you're sending, not the beginning of an interpersonal conflict.

I'm not using "protected political speech" as any kind of criterion. I'm saying that in general, I would like to let people say what they want to say, and in particular to give extra leeway where speaking hostility to a person in power, and it didn't seem like a clear personal attack, so I decided to leave it.

[–] Five 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

When interacting with a remote instance, usually remote Admin accounts aren't clearly marked the way they are locally - he only saw me as [OP]. I don't think he realized he was attacking a site Admin in his reply, so he doesn't get a pass for hostility to a "person in power." His hostility was merely hostility.

As an aside, American cops aren't protected against personal attacks. Insults to their profession and their person are both protected speech, from what I understand. Officers are expected to show restraint when insulted, although that's not often the case. There's a class of speech defined as "Fighting Words" - IANAL but when it comes to police, unless you're saying "I'm going to punch you" or some similar specific violent threat, I believe your speech is protected by the First Amendment, and in case it is not, there's a lawsuit you're likely to win.

I think we both value diversity of opinion, and I appreciate you putting yourself out as a moderator and trying new things. We've both accepted roles that gives us small privileges, but mostly responsibility. I value your contribution to the instance, and I hope that's communicated through this dialogue despite our disagreements.

At this point my goal is not to convince you to take a specific moderator action. I'm responding to the observation that !pleasantpolitics seems to be deviating from the goals you initially set, and I'd like to understand and clarify what is going on.

[–] auk 1 points 1 month ago

That's fair.

Like I said, I think this is a borderline case. The comment in question could be concisely expressing a political viewpoint about your posting and how it relates to a growing movement in American politics to give harsh criticism to Democratic politicians in ways that, intentionally or not, give aid and comfort to a takeover of the system by elements that are an existential threat to everybody in the US, on every side. Or, it could be just content-free hostility. It's hard to tell, and since the poster in general is a certified non-jerk, I erred on the side of leaving it. But I can understand the other side of it, absolutely.

A handful of people gave me reports that your postings were "unpleasant," which I objected to in order to protect your right to say what you want. I feel the same way about someone who has a generally good posting record coming in and being Zionist or leaving a bluntly rude comment about the topic of an article.

I get it. You're not wrong. I think it might be worth me adding an entry to the FAQ, along the lines of:

Q: This isn't pleasant!

A: "Pleasant" was the wrong word. People will sometimes say things you find unpleasant, potentially more so than on Lemmy usually, since the human moderation is lighter. That's by design. Many Lemmy communities contain a large amount of content which is "polite" or "civil" but which in the aggregate is detracting significantly from the experience. I do plan to allow content which is offensive, up to a certain point, as long as it doesn't become a dominant force.

The theory is that we're all adults, and we can handle an occasional rude comment or viewpoint we don't like. If someone is a habitual line-stepper, then they will get escorted to the door, but part of the whole point is that the good actors can be free of a moderator looking over their shoulder on every comment deciding whether or not they're allowed to say it.

That's not to mean this is a "free speech" community. If content that's offensive for the sake of offensiveness starts to proliferate, then I'll probably put rules into place to address it. But you will find content that is not "pleasant."

What do you think?

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don’t understand, is the bot operating in pleasantpolitics, progressivepolitics, and lemmy.world politics? Multiple?

I’m not trying to defeat the purpose for a bot or anything, but those who would welcome a second - and final - trump administration can expect some pushback as I have no interest in harboring some fediverse version of The_Donald or whatever tankie equivalent there is. I would be happy to avoid those if that was the intent for any of the above.

There just doesn’t seem to be a community for it at present other than progressivepolitics or politicalmemes. Opinion pieces, one-off comment screenshots, or anything that isn’t directly a mainstream article or “funny” is hard to find a home for. Politics requires an article with a verbatim title, news requires same with a mainstream source - those are the only ones I’ve seen with more than 50 subscribers.

Fwiw the “fuck you” was directed at the Grauniad article, which “joe biden’s cold heart” is inflammatory to start, regardless of how it tried - and failed - to spin it in the body of the article. Firstly it’s not true, secondly it’s been shown in a “major” publication to not be the case (WaPo or NYT, i forget), thirdly “gEnOSiDe jOe” is a russian-troll-farm-like tactic to depress turnout, and lastly the actual existence of American democracy is very literally at stake in this election and the article is intentionally oblivious to that. I stand by the “fuck you”, it is deserved, appropriate, and all things considered, tame compared to the offense.

That said, if defense of democracy or an understanding of American politics in one of these communities is intended to not transgress ‘politeness’ as determined by downvotes, I’ll try to participate accordingly. It may ultimately just mean I avoid the community, but that too is okay if that’s the requirement.

[–] auk 1 points 1 month ago

I don’t understand, is the bot operating in pleasantpolitics, progressivepolitics, and lemmy.world politics? Multiple?

The bot reads a large number of communities to form its decisions, including those. It only actively moderates !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net.

I’m not trying to defeat the purpose for a bot or anything, but those who would welcome a second - and final - trump administration can expect some pushback as I have no interest in harboring some fediverse version of The_Donald or whatever tankie equivalent there is. I would be happy to avoid those if that was the intent for any of the above.

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.

There just doesn’t seem to be a community for it at present other than progressivepolitics or politicalmemes. Opinion pieces, one-off comment screenshots, or anything that isn’t directly a mainstream article or “funny” is hard to find a home for. Politics requires an article with a verbatim title, news requires same with a mainstream source - those are the only ones I’ve seen with more than 50 subscribers.

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.

Fwiw the “fuck you” was directed at the Grauniad article, which “joe biden’s cold heart” is inflammatory to start, regardless of how it tried - and failed - to spin it in the body of the article. Firstly it’s not true, secondly it’s been shown in a “major” publication to not be the case (WaPo or NYT, i forget), thirdly “gEnOSiDe jOe” is a russian-troll-farm-like tactic to depress turnout, and lastly the actual existence of American democracy is very literally at stake in this election and the article is intentionally oblivious to that. I stand by the “fuck you”, it is deserved, appropriate, and all things considered, tame compared to the offense.

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.

That said, if defense of democracy or an understanding of American politics in one of these communities is intended to not transgress ‘politeness’ as determined by downvotes, I’ll try to participate accordingly. It may ultimately just mean I avoid the community, but that too is okay if that’s the requirement.

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.