I made a robot moderator. It models trust flow through a network that’s made of voting patterns, and detects people and posts/comments that are accumulating a large amount of “negative trust,” so to speak.

In its current form, it is supposed to run autonomously. In practice, I have to step in and fix some of its boo-boos when it makes them, which happens sometimes but not very often.

I think it’s working well enough at this point that I’d like to experiment with a mode where it can form an assistant to an existing moderation team, instead of taking its own actions. I’m thinking about making it auto-report suspect comments, instead of autonomously deleting them. There are other modes that might be useful, but that might be a good place to start out. Is anyone interested in trying the experiment in one of your communities? I’m pretty confident that at this point it can ease moderation load without causing many problems.

!santabot@slrpnk.net

  • Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    But in general, one reason I really like the idea is that it’s getting away from one individual making decisions about what is and isn’t toxic and outsourcing it more to the community at large and how they feel about it, which feels more fair.

    Yeah that does sound useful it is just that there are some communities where it isn’t necessarily clear who is a jerk and who has a controversial minority opinion. For example how do you think the bot would’ve handled the vegan community debacle that happened. There were a lot of trusted users who were not necessarily on the side of vegans and it could’ve made those communities revert back to a norm of what users think to be good and bad.

    I think giving people some insight into how it works, and ability to play with the settings, so to speak, so they feel confident that it’s on their side instead of being a black box, is a really good idea. I tried some things along those lines, but I didn’t get very far along.

    If you’d want I can help with that. Like you said it sounds like a good way of decentralizing moderation so that we have less problems with power tripping moderators and more transparent decisions. I just want it so that communities can keep their specific values while easing their moderation burden.