Comment on Pleasant Politics: Politics without the jerks
archomrade@midwest.social 2 months ago
I know this will ring hollow, considering I am (predictably) on the autoban list, but:
I don’t know how this isn’t a political-echochamber speedrun any%. People downvote posts and comments for a lot of reasons, and a big one (maybe the biggest one in a political community) is general disagreement/dislike, even simply extreme abstract mistrust. This is basically just crowdsourced vibes-based moderation.
Then again, I think communities are allowed to moderate/gatekeep their own spaces however the like. I see little difference between this practice and .ml or lemmygrad preemptively banning users based on comments made on other communities. In fact, I expect the same bot deployed on .ml or hexbear would end up banning the most impassioned centrist users from .world and kbin, and it would result in an accelerated silo-ing of the fediverse if it were applied at scale. Each community has a type of user they find the most disagreeable, and the more this automod is allowed to run the more each space will end up being defined by that perceived opposition.
Little doubt I would find the consensus-view unpalatable in a space like that, so no skin off my nose.
auk@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
I looked at the bot’s judgements about your user. The issue isn’t your politics. Anti-center or anti-Western politics are the majority view on Lemmy, and your posts about your political views get ranked positively. The problem is that somehow you wind up in long heated arguments with “centrists” which wander away from the topic and get personal, where you double down on bad behavior because you say that’s the tactic you want to employ to get your point across. That’s the content that’s getting ranked negatively, and often enough to overcome the weight of the positive content.
If Lemmy split into a silo that was the 98.6% of users that didn’t do that, and a silo of 1.4% of users that wanted to do that, I would be okay with that outcome. I completely agree with your concern in the abstract, but that’s not what’s happening here.
archomrade@midwest.social 2 months ago
I’m not surprised I was identified by the bot, but it’s worth pointing out that ending up in heated arguments happens because people disagree. Those things are related. If someone is getting into lots of lengthy disagreements that are largely positive but devolve into the unwanted behavior, doesn’t that at least give legitimacy to the concern that dissenting opinions are being penalized simply because they attract a lot of impassioned disagreement? Even if both participants in that disagreement are penalized, that just means any disagreement that may already be present isn’t given opportunity to play out. Your community would just be lots of people politely agreeing not to disagree.
I have no problem with wanting to build a community around a particular set of acceptable behaviors -I don’t even take issue with trying to quantify that behavior and automating it. But we shouldn’t pretend as if doing so doesn’t have unintended polarizing consequences.
A community that allows for disagreement but limits argumentation isn’t neutral - it gives preferences to status-quo and consensus positions by limiting the types of dissent allowed. If users aren’t able to resolve conflicting perspectives through argumentation, then the consensus view ends up being left uncontested (at least not meaningfully). That isn’t a problem if the intent of the community is to enforce decorum so that contentious argumentation happens elsewhere, but if a majority of communities utilizes a similar moderation policy then of course it is going to result in siloing.
I might also point out that an argument that is drawn out over dozens of comments and ends in that ‘unwanted’ behavior you’re looking for isn’t all that visible to most users; if you’re someone who is trying to avoid ‘jerks’ then I would think the relative nested position/visibility of that activity should be important. I’m not sure how your bot weighs activity against that visibility, but I think even that doubt that brings into question the effectiveness of this as a strategy.
Again, not challenging the specific moderation choices the bot has made, just pointing out the problem of employing this type of moderation on a large scale. As it has been employed in this particular community is interesting.
auk@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Do you mind if I give some examples? What you’re saying is valid in the abstract, but I think pointing out concrete examples of what the bot is reacting to will shed some light on what I’m talking about.
archomrade@midwest.social 2 months ago
You’re free to provide examples, but like I said it’s not the specific moderation choices that are the problem, it’s using public sentiment as a core part of that determination.