Better Lemmy Through Automated Moderation

Santa is a robot moderator. Santa will decide if you're naughty or nice. Santa has no chill.

Hi everyone!

The slrpnk admins were nice enough to let me try a little moderation experiment. I made a moderation bot called Santa, which tries to ease the amount of busywork for moderators, and reduce the level of unpleasantness in conversations.

If someone's interactions are attracting a lot of downvotes compared to their upvotes, they are probably not contributing to the community, even if they are not technically breaking any rules. That's the simple core of it. Then, on top of that, the bot gives more weight to users that other people upvote frequently, so it is much more accurate than simply adding up the up and down vote totals. In testing, it seemed to do a pretty good job figuring out who was productive and not.

Most people upvote more than they downvote. To accumulate a largely negative opinion from the community, your content has to be very dislikable. The current configuration bans less than 3% of the users that it evaluates, but there are some vocal posters in that 3%, which is the whole point.

It is currently live and moderating !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net. It is experimental. Please don't test it by posting bad content there. If you have a generally good posting history, it will probably let you get away with being obnoxious, and it won't be a good test. Test it by posting good things that you think will attract real-life jerks, and let it test its banhammer against them instead of you.

FAQ

Q: I just saw content that wasn't pleasant!

A: "Pleasant" was the wrong word for the test community. People will sometimes say things you find unpleasant, potentially more so, 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 total 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 shown 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."

Q: Why was my comment deleted?

A: Sorry. If you haven't posted a lot in the recent past, but you've been getting some downvotes, the bot will err on the side of caution and not let you post. This isn't a perfect solution, since it starts to verge on removing unpopular viewpoints, but it's necessary to protect the community from malicious content from throwaway accounts.

If you don't have a lot of recent activity in your account, but you've posted some unpopular things, Santa may come after you. It may not be fair. The best thing to do is to post productively and actively outside of controversial topics, wait a few days, and try again.

Q: Why was I banned?

A: You may be a jerk. Sorry you had to find out this way.

It's not hard to accumulate more weighted upvotes than downvotes. In the current configuration, 99% of the users on Lemmy manage it. If you are one of the 1%, it's because you have enough posting history that the bot has observed a firm community consensus that your contributions are more negative than positive.

The bot is not making a decision about you. The community is. If you are banned, it's because you are being downvoted overwhelmingly. The viewpoint you are expressing is probably not the issue. The Lemmy community is very tolerant of a wide variety of views. Some people may disagree with you and you may find that oppressive, but the bot will not ban you simply because some users argue with you when you say certain things. Those users are allowed to have their view, just like you have yours.

If you find you are banned and you're willing to hear suggestions about how to present your argument without everyone downvoting you, leave a comment. Reducing your downvotes will help the bot recognize you as reasonable, but it will also probably help you get your point across more successfully. In order for the bot to ban you, you have to be received overwhelmingly negatively by the community, which probably means you're not convincing very many people of what you're saying.

If you're not willing to hear those suggestions and simply want to insist that it's everyone else that is the problem, the bot is being evil to you, your free speech is being infringed, and I am a tyrant if I don't let you into the community to annoy everybody, I would respectfully request that you take it somewhere else.

Q: How long do bans last?

A: Bans are transient and based on user sentiment going back one month from the present day. If you have not posted much in the last month, even a single downvoted comment could result in a ban. If that happened to you, it should be easy to reverse the ban in a few days by engaging and posting outside of the moderated community, showing good faith and engagement, and bringing your average back up.

If you are at all a frequent poster on Lemmy and received a ban, you might have some negative rank in your average, and your ban may be indefinite until your habitual type of postings and interactions changes, and your previous interactions age past the one month limit.

Q: How can I avoid getting banned?

A: Engage positively with the community, respect others’ opinions, and contribute constructively. Santabot’s algorithm values the sentiment of trusted community members, so positive interactions are key.

If you want to hear examples of positive and negative content from your history, let me know and I can help. Pure voting totals are not always a good guideline to what the bot is reacting to.

Q: How does it work?

A: The code is in a Codeberg repository. There's a more detailed description of the algorithm there, or you can look at the code.

Q: Won't this create an echo chamber?

A: It might. I looked at its moderation decisions a lot and it's surprisingly tolerant of unpopular opinions as long as they're accompanied by substantial posting outside of the unpopular opinion. More accurately, the Lemmy community is surprisingly tolerant of a wide range of opinions, and that consensus is reflected when the bot parses the global voting record.

If you're only posting your unpopular opinion, or you tend to get in arguments about it, then that's going to be a problem, much more than someone who expresses an unusual opinion but still in a productive fashion or alongside a lot of normal interactions.

If you feel strongly that some particular viewpoint, or some particular person's ability to stand up for it, is going to be censored, post a comment below with your concerns, and we can talk. It's a fair concern, and there might be cases where it's justified, and the bot's behavior needs to be adjusted. Without some particular case to reference, though, it's impossible to address the concern, so please be specific if you want to do this.

Q: Won't people learn to fake upvotes for themselves and trick the bot?

A: They might. The algorithm is resistant to it but not perfectly. I am worried about that, to be honest, much more than about the bot's decisions about aboveboard users being wrong all that often.

Q: Why doesn't the bot notify for bans?

There are a few users who get banned or unbanned very day, as the pattern of user comments and votes changes over time. It's important that bans be "lightweight," and always reversible for anyone who is banned. It's not a heavy thing like most Lemmy moderation. It already bothers me that the flow of bans creates spam in the modlog. I don't want to amplify that to DM spam across all of Lemmy.

I did have functionality at one point to notify for certain situations, and it triggered once, and that user complained to me that my bot was notifying them about a ban in a community they had never heard of and didn't care about at all. I think they were right to complain. I don't want to send out spam. Multiplying that interaction by 100 user actions per month isn't something I want to do.

I do want to make sure it's transparent to people why they are banned, and what they can do to get unbanned, if it comes up. If anyone has any ideas about how I can make it more clear to people who do try to post and find they are banned, that they are banned and why, I'm open to the suggestion. I've tried to do this, but I found that the people who are banned aren't interested in any reasonable conversation about any of that, so I doubt that anything I could do on my end would make it work any better. You have to be very unreasonable for the bot to blacklist you outright.

What do you think?

It may sound like I've got it all figured out, but I don't think I do. Please let me know what you think. The bot is live on !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net so come along and give it a try. Post controversial topics and see if the jerks arrive and overwhelm the bot. Or, just let me know in the comments. I'm curious what the community thinks.

Thank you!