I think some of it was for DM harrassment or posting fan fiction about other people on Lemmy.

Again, assumption. And no, none of that ever happened.

Modlog, search for “harassing.”

Good to know, maybe I missed the tone in your text. I def took it as you were trying to ban me from this instance, lemm.ee, and sh.itjust.works because of what you thought of my previous behavior on an instance that I was banned from weeks ago. Since you are writing to all of the admins there.

That is exactly what I was trying to do, yes. Not for your behavior on the previous instances exactly, but for starting up the same behavior from new accounts since you’d already been banned for it, which is against the rules. I think I explained the commonsense reasons also.

Sending out ban notifications to dozens of users about bans in a community they’ve never heard of doesn’t seem like good bot design.

I am unsurprised that a UniversalMonk fan would think that would be a totally reasonable thing to do, though, and at the same time that banning someone who managed to get an account ban from the least ban-happy instance there is when they make a new account and start doing the same stuff is somehow unreasonable.

Your ban is in the modlog. It’s about halfway down, search for “pleasant”.

I’m mostly relying on common sense here. Your participation in previous politics communities was incredibly obnoxious. The issue was never that you were talking about third parties and posting news articles. I don’t even know all the details of why you were banned. I think some of it was for DM harrassment or posting fan fiction about other people on Lemmy. Now that you’ve been banned, you’ve made new accounts and went looking for new politics communities to start doing the same thing in, while seeking for exact clarifications about the rules that would let you carefully adhere to the letter of them so you could keep doing it, while the overwhelming majority of the community keeps asking you not to.

I’m not trying to be mean about it, and I’m not upset or anything. If you’re interested in changing how you contribute so that you’re a net positive to the community, let’s talk. If you’re planning to continue your current type of contributions, but trying to engineer ways around the rules with multiple accounts or whatever so that you can keep doing it, then the answer is no thank you.

As I said under the other post, I do believe this evasion was entirely unintentional, for the reasons you outlined. The part that was intentional was trolling in lemmy.world politics and some other communities until your whole user got banned, and then making new accounts and going looking for other politics communities to start up exactly the same antics in, explicitly affirming your plan to continue the same pattern of behavior. And, in the course of doing that, you managed to break some rules, set up to protect against that kind of behavior.

I’m not planning to set the bot up to notify dozens of users about their bans in a community they have never posted in and don’t care about. Mostly it doesn’t come up, because you have to be pretty obnoxious for the bot to ban you. Almost no one even close to that boundary even posts there, because almost everyone understands how to interact with other users without collecting hundreds or thousands of downvotes.

I get that you didn’t get a notification, and so probably didn’t know you were banned. You did know you were being obnoxious previously, and refused to stop doing it until it escalated to an account ban, and then made some new accounts and started looking for new places to do it.

I think admins and mods those new places can make the decision about whether that is ban evasion, or whether they want to let you do this all again until you inevitably get banned again sometime later. People have talked with you about why what you’re doing is a problem. Why they would pick that second option is something of a mystery to me, but I’ll leave it up to them. I’m just relaying the information.

It would be a different story if you were just misunderstanding something, and completely open to a conversation about why you keep getting banned and what you can do differently, but you’re clearly more interested in figuring out the details of the rules so you can find ways around them and keep doing your same thing.

The bot banned you from !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net I don’t know how long ago. You had a lower rank, after a while, than even Media Bias Fact Check bot. Somehow. That’s your violation of the letter of the law.

I can’t even find the entry in the modlog because your record of moderation actions is so extensive that it’s almost impossible to make sense of. I seriously tried, and since your account ban and the endless list of deletions and bans people have been giving you, I couldn’t find it. It’s hard to find stuff for now-deleted accounts, I guess. It’s there though. You were banned quite a while ago from !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net under the now-deleted account. I can find a date or a moderation record if you want to see it. Anyway, you put yourself in a position to be able to DM people again after being banned for some kind of offense in DMs, and started posting in new politics communities with the exact same stuff after being banned for a pattern of behavior that I would say the mods were excessively generous about, to the point of moderation malpractice. That’s your violation of the spirit of the law.

You did ban evasion both in letter and in spirit. And, you’re pretending with an innocent face not to understand how anyone could have a negative reaction to you, when you’re clearly aiming for exactly that negative reaction with a lot of your past posts. That’s the proactive element that would lead me, if I were an admin, to ban you on sight.

You need to reevaluate your approach to posting, or else get accustomed to people wanting to ban you. It’s the world’s most natural reaction to what you like doing.

Being the same person who was banned, and posting from a new account, is ban evasion.

You can find a place that can put up with you, if you want to try. That’s the sense in which your voice won’t be silenced. The same people who’ve seen what you have to say and want no part of it are not obligated to continue listening to it forever, with you disabling their attempts not to hear from you anymore. That’s protecting their rights to use Lemmy as they want to use it.

The core algorithm, a robust way to determine global trust rankings based on a network of relative trust, was first codified and used for this purpose in the late 1800s. It would be difficult to come up with a way to attack this problem that is further separated from the era of AI algorithms. I think you would need help from a math historian.

You can do that now, and evade human moderation in the same way.

I don’t want you to give it a try in the Santa communities, even though it would be a badly-needed test of the system. The code that’s supposed to detect and react to that doesn’t get much action. Mostly it’s been misfiring on the innocent case, and attacking innocent people because they’re new and they said one wrong thing one day. I think I fixed that, but it would be nice to test it in the other case, with some participation that I know is badly intended, and make sure it’s still capable of reacting and nuking the comments.

But no, please don’t. The remedy for that kind of thing is for admins to have to do work to find and ban you at the source, or look at banning VPNs or something which is sad for other reasons, so I don’t want that. Just leave it until real bad people do it for real, and then me and the admins will have to work out how to get rid of them when it happens.

It’s the last 30 days of comments. That’s long enough to be robust, but short enough that someone can realistically rehabilitate their image with the bot by not being a jerk for 30 days, and restore their posting ability.

I was hoping that it would be a good tool for self-reflection and fairness in moderation. In practice, the people who get banned for being jerks are totally uninterested in revising their commenting strategy, and choose instead just to yell at me that I’m awful and my bot is unfair and it should be their right to come in and be a jerk if they want to, and banning them means I am breaking Lemmy. Then they restart one of the arguments that got them banned in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking, expecting anything different, but that’s what happened. You can see some of it happening in these comments.

New accounts, or accounts that have been recently inactive, are a hard problem. I think I’ve got it mostly worked out now. If the bot has limited information, it won’t ban you, but it will be super-strict if you have a generally negative reception, and if its unclear impression of you is negative and you also make a comment that gets downvoted, it’ll delete the comment. I think it should work fairly well, but it’s still in development. It’s hard to test, because that situation only comes up a few times a month, so I basically just have to wait a while every time I do it.

You can check a user by searching the modlog for their user, and santa@slrpnk.net as the moderator, and see what comes up. If you see that they’ve been banned at any point, then they are probably a reprobate of one sort or another.

Tell you what. I can respond to this in two different ways. I really don’t agree with silencing people who have a different point of view than I do. On other platforms, I’ve spent a ton of time arguing with conservatives. So much time. It’s not unfamiliar to me. I don’t think people need to limit their interactions to only the people who are “right,” if that makes sense. It’s okay for someone to be saying something that I think is wrong, as long as they’re open to a conversation about it. I can say where I think some of your sources have a long history of deliberately misleading people, as a way of making the case that they are misleading you, too. I don’t view you as the enemy, necessarily, but I do think you’re mistaken.

If I’m going to have that conversation with me, then you don’t have to agree with me or be nice to me, but I do need you to be willing to hear me out. In exchange, I’ll promise to hear you out, too, and take seriously what you’re saying, enough to disagree with it honestly and respectfully when I disagree with it. Is that something you’re interested in? Because we have about as different a set of viewpoints as you could imagine, but I’m still fine talking with you, and having a real exchange of views.

If you don’t want to do that, and just want to emit your viewpoint and belittle other viewpoints until people remove you from the community, then I can respond to you accordingly. But I would prefer to do the first thing. I don’t think this is the forum for it, but we can surely find one, and I can spend a while talking with you about the viewpoints you seem to think are getting you censored.

Edit: Grammar

You got banned for hot takes like, “A lot more pedophiles endorsing Harris though. It would cancel out if they were about the same, but they aren’t.”

I’m curious to know what you said under the posts about the Harris campaign HQ getting shot with bullets, or the disinformation project which produced the video of illegal immigrants saying they’re registered to vote, but not curious enough to look into it any further.

Sounds like the bot knows its job. The paradox of tolerance is tempting, but it’s resisting.

So it would delete people’s posts if they get downvoted a lot

No.

or if the poster tends to upvote heavily downvoted posts?

No.

You’ve automated the suppression of dissenting voices.

Am not.

It’s a perfectly fair concern. I’m trying to be careful to make sure I’m not doing that. There’s quite a lot of explanation in the FAQ, and some conversations you can look back over with people who were concerned, because they’ve had experience with exactly that happening to them.

At one point I tried to illustrate with data just how big a jerk you have to be before it starts banning you. If you’re interested, I can start doing that again. Being a dissenting voice on its own is nowhere near enough to anger the bot. You can look over !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net and see quite a few dissenting voices. I’ve also offered to delve, for any user who feels that this has happened to them, into the breakdown of why they’re being ranked down, which almost always is because they’re being a jerk about their “dissenting” opinion, and not the opinion itself.

Also, I think it’s hilarious that someone coming from lemmy.ml is accusing me of trying to suppress dissenting voices. Lemmy.ml has been suppressing dissenting voices since its inception. The degree to which I’m bending over backwards not to suppress dissenting voices is something I think you should absorb and carry over to the lemmy.ml moderators as a good replacement for their current banhammer circus.

I made this system because I, also, was concerned about the macro social implications.

Right now, the model in most communities is banning people with unpopular political opinions or who are uncivil. Anyone else can come in and do whatever they like, even if a big majority of the community has decided they’re doing more harm than good. Furthermore, when certain things get too unpleasant to deal with on any level anymore, big instances will defederate from each other completely. The macro social implications of that on the community are exactly why I want to try a different model, because that one doesn’t seem very good.

You seem to be convinced ahead of time that this system is going to censor opposing views, ignoring everything I’ve done to address the concern and indicate that it is a valid concern. Your concern is noted. If you see it censoring any opposing views, please let me know, because I don’t want it to do that either.

It’s difficult. A downvote from an account with no history does nothing. Your bot has to post a lot of content first to attract upvotes from genuine accounts. Then once you’ve accumulated some rank, you can start giving upvotes or downvotes in bulk to the accounts you want to manipulate. It’s impossible to completely prevent that, but you have to do it a lot to have an impact.

I think this model is more resistant to trickery than it would seem, but it’s not completely resistant. I do expect some amount of trickery that will then need counter-trickery. On the other hand, the problem of tricking the system also exists in the current moderation model. You don’t have to outwit the system to get your content posted or ban your enemy if it’s trivial to flood the comment section with your content from alt accounts and drown them out instead. I don’t know for sure that something like that is happening, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that was one reason why there are so many obnoxiously vocal people.

Here are examples of things you got positive rank for, politics and argumentation:

• https://midwest.social/comment/10357782
• https://midwest.social/comment/10246105
• https://midwest.social/post/13347310

Here are examples of things you got negative rank for, not directly political interpersonal squabbling:

• https://midwest.social/comment/10412423
• https://midwest.social/comment/10413376
• https://midwest.social/comment/10432272

Maybe this is harsh, but I think this is a good decision by the bot. The first list is fine. Most of your political views are far from unpopular on Lemmy. The thing is that you post a lot more of the squabbling content than the political content. You said you’re being unpleasant on purpose, don’t plan to stop, and that people should probably block you. I feel okay about excluding that from this community.

If in the future you change your mind about how you want to converse, you can send a comment or DM. We can talk about it, make sure you’re not being targeted unfairly, but in the meantime this is completely fair.

Look at him, he’s so happy.

Maybe it should be Bernie smiling, instead? I didn’t want to be openly partisan.

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.

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.

I added an explanation of the details of how it works to the source file that implements the main rank algorithm. The math behind it is not simple, but it’s also not rocket science, if you have some data science abilities and want to check it out.

It was remarkable, when I started looking at it, how small the population of users is that seem to be causing almost all of the problems. It was also remarkable how little the existing moderation approach is doing to rein them in.