Some people have been accusing me of creating this bot so I can manifest a one-viewpoint echo chamber. They tell me that they already know that I'm trying to create an echo chamber, anything I say otherwise is a lie, and they're not interested in talking about the real-world behavior of the bot, even when I offer to fix anything that seems like a real echo chamber effect that it's creating.
I don't think it's creating an echo chamber. We've had a Zionist, an opponent of US imperialism, a lot of centrists, some never-Bideners, some fact checking, and one "fuck you." The code to delete downvoted comments from throwaway accounts is pretty much working, but it's only been triggered once. Someone said Mike Johnson's ears were ugly and that made him a bad person, which everyone hated and downvoted, so the bot deleted it since the person that said it didn't have other recent history to be able to use to categorize them. I sent the user a note explaining how the throwaway detection works.
I want to list out the contentious topics from the week, and how I judge the bot's performance and the result for each one, to see if the community agrees with me about how things are looking:
Biden's supreme court changes
I like the performance here. The pleasant comments have a diversity of opinion, but people aren't fighting or shouting their opinions back and forth at each other. The lemmy.world section looks argumentative and low-quality.
Blue MAGA
I don't love the one-sidedness of the pleasant comments section. It's certainly more productive with less argumentation, which is good, but there are only two representatives of one of the major viewpoints chiming in, which starts to sound like an attempt at an echo chamber.
I read the lemmy.world version for a while, and I started to think the result here is acceptable. The pleasant version still has people who have every ability to speak up for the minority viewpoint, but it was limited to people who were being coherent about it, and giving reasons. A lot of the people who spoke up in the lemmy.world version, on both sides, were combative and got engaged in long hostile exchanges, without listening or backing up what they were saying. That's what I don't want.
Biden's Palestine policy
I don't love "fuck you." I debated whether it was protected political speech expressing a viewpoint on the article, or a personal attack, and I couldn't decide, so I left it up. For one thing, I think it's good to err on the side of letting people say what they want to the admins, to bend over backwards just slightly to avoid a situation where some users or their viewpoints are more special, or shielded from firm disagreement, than others. And yes, I recognize the irony.
This one is my least favorite comments section. The user who's engaging in a hostile exchange of short messages has a lot of "rank" to be able to say what they want, and the current model assumes that since people generally like their comments, they should be allowed to speak their mind. The result, however, is starting to look combative to me. It's still far better than the exchanges from lemmy.world, but I don't love it.
What does everyone else think? I don't know if anyone but me cares about these issues in this depth, but I'm interested in hearing any feedback.
The bot banned you from [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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.