auk

It never even occurred to me that carbon capture might be storing a giant tank of gaseous carbon dioxide. I assumed that it meant chemically reacting the carbon into some kind of solid material which was then discarded as waste, because trying to store huge chambers full of gaseous CO2 at a scale that can impact climate change is clinically insane.

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.

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.

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:

• 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.

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.