this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
30 points (84.1% liked)
TechTakes
2567 readers
263 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
did you read my post and see the bit where I don't make any moderation claims? where's the code?
The code of what? The script that uses the lemmy API to download the public post history of a user?
You linked to disinfo and them claimed we"feed posts wholesale to prompts". You know the implication you were trying to make, and as it's clear from the comments from others here that it's working.
are you being intentionally obtuse? the code to do everything involved with this issue. the code that would be a very simple demonstrative "oh, okay, so that's what's happening" read with literally no ambiguity, as is extremely usual to do in open source. that code. where is it?
This is an internal tool that a mod developed and an admin was trying out. You realize that at this point I could just post any fucking code I want to prove whatever I want, right? So you understand this doesn't prove anything? So why not just believe me when I tell you that all the script was doing was downloading a user's public post history via the API?
I anyway asked the developer to share the code with me, as again, it wasn't an official instance tooling.
The code was used to pull a users comment history into a text file, which was then used to ban the user, right? Leaving the fact that it was then fed into an LLM that may or may not have been self hosted based on "jokes" aside, how is code used in an official instance action like moderation not "official instance" tooling?
Do you post a public log of all your "official instance tooling?" How often, and in want instances, has "unofficial instance tooling" been used to do official instance actions like banning users?
then my take/read is that your team simply sucks at this
your posts across various threads about this for DAYS are all running interference, and you could simply have skipped past that by going "look, here's what ran, here's the logs"
and as I said in my other comment on the other branch: running around shouting like you are isn't a great look
why are you going to bat for someone using unofficial tooling that proved to be extremely unpopular because it was used in a manner that looked like abuse to most observers and qualifies as abuse for instances like ours? it feels kind of rich to come here angry when other people are asking you to stop. maybe you can just take our word for it that we don’t want an LLM anywhere in the moderation process, even as a post summarizer? you don’t have to understand why if you don’t want to.
and yeah you absolutely can lie about this crap. it kind of makes it worse that you and your mod felt they didn’t have to. we really don’t want any of this normalized on any level.
forgive me for I have sinned:
sins
I am not defending them. Trust me I am plenty annoyed that I have to deal with the fallout and the constant disinfo it opened us up on. But at the end of the day, we're humans and people are new at moderating and new to social media, and don't always understand how visuals come across and how easy it is for people to pick up the pitchforks, and I'd rather make this a learning moment than a purging moment.
I will absolutely accept the shit that comes our way because people didn't think how their actions would look (again, this doesn't mean that LLM for moderation is good but being seen using is bad. The former is bad too.) But I don't like being blamed for bringing the frigging LLM apocalypse to the fediverse, you know what I mean?
For the record: I'm not angry at people telling us to stop. I am angry because we never even started and I keep saying this and it feels like people are just not listening and keep repeating the same disinfo and I have to keep saying "People, this is not true, this is not at all what happened" again and again.
absolutely! please show me you’ve learned from this moment by taking a stance against the use of LLMs anywhere in the moderation process and making it part of your instance’s policies going forward.
I think that would just be performative at this point, but I'll discuss with the team.
perform away! please keep in mind that Lemmy and ActivityPub are communities, and the only proof of intent we have is through action. a change in policy might feel performative, but it gives me something I can boost as a positive example and a sign that things will be better going forward.
We're probably long overdue with an official meta post in our instance about this whole shitshow that we can link on the next time this disinfo is pushed.