After last week's post and talking with some people, here is my proposal for bringing transparency to the Santa bot. I can set it up to, every week, post a spot-check of some of its judgements, using this visualization format:
The bar code section at the top shows red for negative rank (downvotes), and blue for positive rank (upvotes). Time goes left to right, over the course of the past month, with a stripe for each impactful comment and post. Then, below the big red/blue bar code, there's a key with some other colors, linking particular sections to participation in particular threads.
In this case, you can see that there were some unpopular things said by this person, but outweighed by normal positive participation. This is generally what it looks like if someone posts controversial opinions but isn't trolling. You can see some red, but it's not a clear pattern. It's just that they say things sometimes that people don't like.
Compare that with this:
That's a pretty large amount of pretty bright red, and looking over the comments, what's garnering the downvotes isn't even their opinion. It is long exchanges bitterly attacking any person who disagrees with their viewpoint, and being noisy and abrasive in general. That's a lot more unpopular on Lemmy than a simple unpopular opinion. This user is banned by Santa. This is what I mean by "unpleasant," when I say "pleasant politics."
What I propose to do is to regularly post some of these breakdowns, along with example comments, for people who are just barely over the line on one side or the other. The goal is twofold:
- People can see how Santa works instead of it just being me telling people to trust me.
- It sheds some light on what people on Lemmy give a lot of hate for, hopefully helping people to be able to engage and communicate their point better. Usually, when people are getting widely downvoted, it's not at all the opinion they're expressing. It's their delivery. Either intentionally or not, they're being blaring or confrontational with their delivery of it, showing disrespect to anyone who thinks differently, getting in long angry disputes, and suchlike. For some reason, this is usually coupled with claiming that they're not being well-received because their opinion is unpopular, even though the core of the opinion is more often than not something that's widely popular, or at least tolerated, when people express it more productively.
Here is one of those snapshots, exactly as I would set up Santa to post it periodically. The goal is that by posting what things look like just on the good side of the line, and just on the bad side, it sheds light on where the line is and what it looks like.
Users who are not banned, but getting close
Example one (not banned)
Example comment, from 7 Takeaways From the Seemingly Endless Fire Season | While the Line fire burns in Southern California, what can we learn from how a changing climate has affected an expanding fire season?:
California is not a good example of wildfires caused by climate change. California is an excellent example of how not letting natural fires burn over the last few decades has created unhealthy forests full of dead tree/bushes that are now powderkegs waiting to go off.
California, especially things like redwoods, evolved to NEED a cleansing fire every so often. THAT is our natural climate and we have been fighting against THAT for years.
This isn't "climate change". This is "the climate isn't what we humans want so we tried to change it and now we're suffering the effects of that."
Example two (not banned)
Example comment, from Craaaawling in my skiiin:
Bad taste then, bad taste now. No development or change in perspective. If this is you, you should be disappointed in yourself. Grow as you age.
Edit: hahaha people did NOT like this comment. They're BAD, guys. Whiny, cringey, melodramatic. It's music for a 12 year old.
Examples of users that are banned, but only just
Example one (banned)
Example comment, from Mexico will amend its constitution this weekend to require all judges to be elected:
Between these two options:
indulging in the delusion of neutral judges and letting the elite pick the ones who do the best job of pretending to be neutral while representing their interests
discarding the illusion of neutral judges and picking ones who openly state (and ideally have a record) that they will seek to pursue and enact justice as both they and the better part of the population interpret it
I think one of these is clearly superior for "promoting justice". Do you disagree?
Yes, I disagree. I already stated why.
But you yourself admitted that there may be no such thing as "neutral," "apolitical" justices. If there aren't, what good does pretending do?
Example two (banned)
Example comment, from People who hate fat people disguise their hate as science.:
why not hate them for both scientific reasons and viscerally?
Thoughts?