I don’t see anything about preventing corporate landlords from buying it all and renting it back to us.
The source is the video. I found a news story about the event, but it was cringey, so I decided the video spoke for itself.
I agree. It’s working well at what I intended it to be, in my opinion, but the name is flat-out wrong at this point.
I made a post with my evaluation of the bot’s ability to create a space where people can disagree without being horrible about it. I think it’s succeeding at that, and these contentious topics are a good test case, since it’s not meant to create a space for only pleasant topics. The name is misleading. I don’t know why I didn’t expect this, but I didn’t.
What do you think? I’m interesting in hearing feedback on how people are receiving the content they’re seeing here. If the bot is working in my opinion, but the result from the reader isn’t good, that’s an issue.
I made !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net to test a new moderation approach which is designed to filter out a lot of the crap. I think you should try posting some articles there, and see whether you see the same hyper-critical anti-Biden content. I think I know what you’re talking about, and I think the filtering bot will probably be able to detect and ban almost all of the users you’re talking about.
That didn’t take long.
Criticizing the foreign policy of the US can be done openly in every part of Lemmy that I’m aware of. it’s the majority viewpoint. The issue here is that you’re being a combative jerk about it.
You were supposed to be banned because of the overwhelming downvotes you’re getting. There are some technical problems with the bot’s classification of new accounts, so you’re still here. Ironically, it got held up because I was having issues getting it to be strict about new accounts without excluding dissenting opinions from people who were willing to be level-headed. Your viewpoint here is far from unpopular, but there are cases where someone’s expressing an opinion about veganism, or not voting, that really is unpopular, but they’re being level-headed enough that I don’t want them to be banned. It’s taking some time to get that determination right.
You can expect a ban as soon as I figure it out, because you’re being so obviously unproductive that the downvotes are universal. I just updated the FAQ, trying to find the right words, because I don’t think this is the last time this will come up.
It’s not hard to accumulate more weighted upvotes than downvotes. In the current configuration, 97% of the users on Lemmy manage to do it. If you are one of the 3%, it’s because the community consensus is that your content is more negative than positive.
The bot is not making its own decisions 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.
This usually only happens when threads hit the front page of the all feed and people that are not subscribed to the community see it, vote on it and start commenting in it (which then becomes a self-reinforcing system that pushes it further up the “hot” rating on the all feed).
This community is currently too new and small for that to happen.
I’ll wait until I can put in place the throwaway account sniping, and more testing, before I try to do much more to promote it. The wider level of attention from !newcommunities@lemmy.world seems to be a good test which the bot hasn’t caught up to be able to handle completely.
As for pro-Zionist comments… if they come from an account that is not only posting such and it isn’t outright genocide denial, I agree that it can stay up.
Yes, that user posts almost all normal content, with a tiny minority of unpopular but still “normal” political views, and a couple of posts that are openly Zionist. They’re nowhere near posting a majority of inflammatory content, and the comment wasn’t even that bad, it just seemed shocking because it was so pro-Israel, which usually doesn’t happen.
But this will likely need human intervention and can’t be left to the bot to decide.
I completely agree. I didn’t plan to have the bot replace human moderation, only provide another tool to automate one part of it.
Anyone who is breaking the few rules that do exist, I was planning to ban. I also just edited the sidebar to make it clear that comments must also follow the slrpnk rules.
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.
It could also be an attempt to probe which ways of having fun by being a jerk are still available here.
If it gets deleted, then it’s an illustration that all the people who are telling me that I’m creating an echo chamber are right, and they can complain.
If it doesn’t get deleted, it’s an open door for people who wants to have a “free speech safe space” for things that aren’t welcome anywhere else, indicating that they can come in and disrupt the conversation as much as they want to with topics that are more about stirring controversy than making progress, and that’s fun, too.
It should have been deleted, but only because it was posted by a throwaway account. The bot didn’t do its job, which I will fix, but in the meantime I’m leaving the topic alone and letting it run its course. If any.
You’re not banned or even close to it. The ban list is surprisingly lenient in terms of people’s differing political views. You have to habitually make enemies of a lot of the people in the comments, one way or another, with a big fraction of what you post. Most people don’t do that, wherever on the political spectrum they might fall.
Whether that’s a good idea or not remains to be seen. I had some surprises today.
Here are examples of things you got positive rank for, politics and argumentation:
Here are examples of things you got negative rank for, not directly political interpersonal squabbling:
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 think it’s a good test.
OP, you’re not completely wrong, but you need to work on your delivery. Sorry. You probably have a ban incoming, but you can probably reverse it in a few days by participating outside this community with more normal content, and then try again without using the energy that sounds like you’re challenging the whole community to step outside with you and fight. DM me if you have questions.
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.
It’s in the sidebar:
Post political news, or your own opinions or discussion. Anything goes. No personal attacks, no bigotry, no spam. Those will get a manual temporary ban.
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.
I’ve already declined two reports requesting that I take moderator action against content that’s people directly going out into their community and helping get things done, because that is “not politics.” People definitely seem to want their mods to be vigorously engaged in enforcing the boundaries on the stuff people are allowed to say.
As far as my take on it, we can have overlap between the peasant politics and the pleasant politics. The community was for the latter, but the former sounds great, too.
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.
I think you missed the big triangle you have to click on.
Here’s a transcript:
Election workers, the vast majority of them women, say they’re feeling vulnerable to the charged political climate surrounding the 2024 election. 38% of the women staffing the polls say they’ve experienced threats, harassment, or abuse, fueling the violence, disinformation, and conspiracy theories following the 2020 election.
Joining us now, Elizabeth Landers, lead correspondent for the Scripps News Disinformation Desk.
“And Liz, you traveled to Surrey County in North Carolina to really dig deep on this. What did you find?”
“We traveled there back in June to get a sense of how disinformation is impacting election workers, specifically the almost all-female team that heads up Surrey County’s elections. This is a small county. It’s about 70,000 people. It’s best known as the birthplace of Andy Griffith. And it’s overwhelmingly a red Republican area, went 75% for the former president in 2020. Despite that though, and despite him winning that area, this small community has been dealing with mis- and disinformation around the elections since they took place.”
“And the woman who heads up the elections there is Michelle Huff. She’s a team of just four other people helping her administer these elections. They’re working on this year-round. She described to us how things have changed since 2020. Take a listen.”
“And Allie, disinformation in Surrey County for Michelle really reached a head in 2022. She said there were people that showed up at their office, confronted her about their voting systems, were asking her to see the voting machines, which the North Carolina State Board of Elections says that would have been illegal to give access to people who are not allowed to be around voting machines, that access to critical infrastructure there. They said they had evidence that the voting machines were pinging cell towers in 2020. So they were pushing conspiracies and unfounded information to her.”
“And Michelle has said that she has had to harden their office, make changes there that she never thought that she would have to consider the safety of herself, her staff, her family. But really, she has in the last four years. And she is concerned about this in the lead up to the election in November.”
“It makes a lot of sense, especially given the fact that this is a county that went so squarely for Trump. And yet the aspersions and bad faith that he has put upon the election system writ large are clearly even playing out in red counties. So then given what we saw in 2020, given what she’s experiencing in counties like this one, what’s being done to protect election workers? And I also imagine that this is impacting the number of people who want to be election workers.”
“Absolutely. The Brennan Center for Justice, who we interviewed for this piece, says that they are losing election workers at sort of an unprecedented rate right now. People just don’t want to do this kind of work because of these threats and harassment that they’re dealing with. And in addition to that, they’re losing the institutional knowledge. There’s a lot of minutiae that are involved in election administration. Every state in this country has a different way that they administer these elections. So the Brennan Center is concerned about that.”
“And I would also just add to that 80 percent of these election workers in this country are female. So part of the reason that we were focused on this story is because we’ve been tracking how disinformation is impacting women over at Scripps News. We’ve been kind of doing a series on this. And this is really impacting election workers because so many of them are women across the country, Allie.”
“Really great reporting, Liz. It’s going to have a long tail as we go into the 2024 election cycle. Thank you for tracking it and thank you for bringing it to us.”