PhilipTheBucket

Wait, is this a dragon fruit? I have I think exactly this plant that I was given, and aside from a single big red flower one time it's never made any effort to make dragon fruit. I thought it was just a aggressively minded cactus...

I love how everyone in your replies is all of a sudden an expert on hitmen and their parameters.

Yes, a few minutes alone in a room with someone is long enough to kill them and make it look like something else. I'm as qualified as anyone else here (I've even seen a YouTube interview with an ex-professional hit man, so probably more so), so I can just say that and it becomes so.

Yeah, generally having it read the conversation (I think as JSON, maybe in markdown for the first pass, I can't remember, it's a little tricky to get the comments into a format where it'll reliably grasp the structure and who said what, but it's doable) and then do its output as JSON, and then have those JSON pieces given as input to further stages, seems like it works pretty well. It falls apart if you try to do too much at once. If I remember right, the passes I wound up doing were:

• What are the core parts of each person's argument?
• How directly is the other person responding to each core part in turn?
• Assign scores to each core part, based on how directly each user responded to it. If you responded to it, then you're good, if you ignored it or just said your own thing, not-so-good, if you pretended it said something totally different so you could make a little tirade, then very bad.

And I think that was pretty much it. It can't do all of that at once reliably, but it can do each piece pretty well and then pass the answers on to the next stage. Just what I've observed of political arguments on Lemmy, I think that would eliminate well over 50% of the bullshit though. There's way too many people who are more excited about debunking some kind of strawman-concept they've got in their head, than they are with even understanding what the other person's even saying. I feel like something like that would do a lot to counteract it.

The fly in the ointment is that people would have to consent to having their conversation judged by it, and I feel like there is probably quite a lot of overlap between the people who need it in order to have a productive interaction, and those who would never in a million years agree to have something like that involved in their interactions...

Well, not really any of the above. I've tried with some mild success to build a "troll detection" system, but it needs far more work. Also, in the months since my initial work on this matter, I've found some far better approaches and would want to implement them. So my old work isn't reflective of the new direction I'm planning to take.

I've actually done a version of this and a couple of other various ideas about it. The current WIP idea works totally differently to what you are talking about, I actually got as far as making a community for it, but then abandoned the effort because I couldn't figure out a way to deploy it that would be in any way productive.

I'm going to say it knowing ahead of time that roughly 100% of the people reading are going to think it's a terrible idea: It is an LLM-based moderator that watches the conversation and can pick out bad faith types on conduct in the conversation. I actually 100% agree with you about political conversation online being almost exclusively a big waste of time (including because of the way moderation happens and people trying to deliberately distort the narrative). This was just my idea to try to help it.

The thing that led me to never do anything with it was that I didn't feel like anyone would ever buy into it enough to even take part in a conversation where it was deployed (even assuming it worked passably well which is not proven). If you care about these issues also, though, would you like to try the experiment of having the whole conversation we're having with it observing the conversation and weighing in? I would actually like to, I'd be fine with continuing with the questions you were asking and continuing this whole debate about moderation and its impact on Lemmy, in that context. Let me know.

I'm not stopping you from laying out your thing, you can still say it. I feel like it'll probably just be a reiteration of what you already said, which is why I don't really want to go back and forth about it, I got your point already and I felt like I said my thing in turn. But sure, go ahead.

Honestly, I'm just sick of having the exact same conversation an indefinite number of times every time I come to lemmy.world.

I'll keep it short: No one from the DNC is on Lemmy. When you post on Lemmy, you're not successfully talking any sense into the Democrats. You're speaking to people who are deciding how to vote, whether to vote, how to get involved with activist organizations, and also just in a truth telling sense helping all of us make sense of what's going on. The problems in American politics go way deeper than one candidate or one party. You are not saving the Democrats by making these recommendations, although they're not really wrong, but you are attempting to take 100% of the oxygen away from other problems (which are also very real) which we are all similarly mostly-powerless to fix but which are also significant problems.

You're also arguing against a bunch of stuff that I, at least, never said, which I understand is fun to do but it's not real productive for us making sense to one another. I'm happy to talk with you, if you do some homework first: Find 5-10 different examples of me talking about Gaza, what a problem it was, and how Biden was complicit in it. Once you've done that (it should take literally one text search, use the @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat account since this one is new), we can chat.

Sorry, did something I said sound like "I'd like to have an extended debate about this with you?" I think I've laid out pretty clearly how I feel about it and why at this point.

The mods used their power to create the impression of a specific narrative, and you bought it.

Everyone knows I always obey what the mods want to shape, as the narrative. Especially Jordan.

Ozma was "right" in the sense that when history was finally written, they're on the right side of it, and Jordan is on the wrong side. Jordan won the narrative battle, but lost the narrative war. Jordan's ability to control and manage that narrative is perfectly on display in those top comments, but now, the narrative has shifted towards the narrative that Ozma was trying to construct and deliver.

If you accept a whole bunch of reframings of things into other things, then yes, this makes perfect sense. For example, you might say that because ozma can't say his viewpoint 15 times a day, but only as many times a day as other people who are posting a variety of viewpoints including criticism of the Democrats, that means his viewpoint was suppressed, on purpose because Jordan bans any constructive criticism of the Democrats, and so on.

I can't really add anything to what I've said already. You're welcome to have the interpretation you like of what happened. It sounds like you're pretty attached to your current one.

return2ozma has only the power of their rhetoric, their prominence, and the support of the community

The fuck are you smoking?

https://lemmy.world/post/16224102

Top replies:

• "Good move, they were a clown and pointing out that they were arguing entirely in bad faith is correct."
• "Dude thank God"
• "My take is the dude just filled the board with unrelenting misery."
• "I think I agree more with the spam angle than the “only bad news” angle."
• "I blocked him quite a while ago. Poll after poll after poll were filling up my feed at one point. Fuck that shit. You sir, may fuck off."

I can't rightly tell if you are legitimately this bad at remembering / perceiving what is happening on Lemmy, is why you're giving me this whole alternate history where with the power of his rhetoric, he was trying to bring light to the darkness, and the mods just wouldn't allow it so they could shape the narrative, but it's seeming less and less likely that this is innocent mistakenness on your part the longer I talk to you about it.

• "

the Ozma one is low hanging fruit because the mod who did the ban said in precise language that it was being done in an effort to control the narrative

That's not at all what he said. He said, more or less, that Ozma had indicated that he was deliberately trying to control the narrative. Specifically, he said he was seeking out anti-Biden stories and posting them as a sort of semi-automated process, just as many as he could find, to bring "balance" or something along those lines to the narrative. He wasn't all that concerned with whether the stories were true -- just "which side" of the narrative they supported.

Like I said, I actually don't agree with that being a good reason for banning him, although I do agree he should have been banned. To be honest I think the design of a lot of Lemmy's systems, moderation included, is just fundamentally broken. If someone wants to come in and manipulate the narrative (which again was what ozma specifically said he was trying to do), there's not any good way to prevent them, which is a problem.

Also like I said I think if you study this objectively you will see that mod abuse works the opposite of the way you're thinking that it does. I think the vast majority of mods that are trying to manipulate the narrative are ones most people haven't heard of, that are quietly finding reasons to ban anyone who argues too loudly with return2ozma or whatever. But I'm happy to see the data. Personally, after having looked at the way the systems fit together and how people try to abuse them on both sides of the user/moderator divide, and done a certain amount of your same type of numerical analysis, I think the right thing to do is more or less to just throw a lot of the core concepts away (or, maybe better, layer some better core concepts on top of them and bring moderation back to its role as just keeping the porn / spam away and try to depend on higher-level constructs to keep debates on track.)

But it would be important to getting a complete picture to also look at someones posts and maybe try and look at how that impacts narratives.

IDK if you really need to do this. You're welcome to, but I feel like instead of spending any significant time trying to prove any particular way that the existing systems are broken, just accepting that they (in particular the "mods are gods" model) are broken, and trying to make something better, might be a better way.

I thought today partly because of this conversation about making a politics community which was something along the lines of:

This community works differently to how most politics communities work. It has strict rules designed to facilitate productive discussion. You can be rude, to a point, but you can't participate in bad faith:

• If you claim someone said something they didn't say, that's a temp ban.
• If you make a factual claim but then aren't interested in backing it up, that's a temp ban.
• If you're asked one or two reasonable questions about what you said, and you're still talking but you're pretending the questions didn't happen, that's a temp ban.

The idea is to make the discussion productive. Let's see how it works. Maybe this is a fool's errand but IDK how any set of moderation could be worse than lemmy.world.

Other misc rules:

• Reliable sources only.
• No image / video posts.
• Self posts for discussion are fine.
• No personal insults.
• No racism / transphobia / related bigotry.

In that world, you'd be able to ban return2ozma the first time he posted an article about how Biden did some horrifying thing that he objectively didn't do, and someone asked about it in the comments, and ozma said "IDK I'm just trying to bring balance" and posted 5 more articles. For me, I would vastly prefer that over the current moderation structure where it is sort of arbitrary rules and the comments are mostly a bad faith free-for-all where the mods' actions don't really do all that much beyond keeping obvious death threats and things away.

Can you sense the salt in my overall feelings lol

Well, I wasn't the one who said it was easy (and IDK that digging through the modlog is the easiest way even for someone who is sure that it happened to find out when it did), but sure. Here are all the posts from Dec 2023 and Jan 2024 that were removed that had "poll" in the title:

7554770 | 2023-12-29T13:56:49.802793Z | Sarah Huckabee Sanders lowest approval rating for governor in last 20 years, Arkansas Poll says | https://www.thv11.com/article/news/politics/sarah-huckabee-sanders-lowest-approval-rating-governor-20-years/91-c76da35b-4704-46de-abc0-0a42ee19ea95
2806047 | 2023-12-29T13:18:36.770457Z | Trump Fan Who Threatened Poll Workers And Officials Sent To Prison | https://crooksandliars.com/2023/08/trump-fan-who-threatened-poll-workers-and
2461059 | 2023-12-29T13:18:19.629020Z | Donald Trump Has an Absurd Amount of Support From Republicans Who Believe He Committed “Serious Federal Crimes”: Poll | https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/07/donald-trump-ron-desantis-2024-poll
3653177 | 2023-12-29T13:16:15.792290Z | Democrat Adam Frisch leads against Rep. Lauren Boebert in poll for 2024 race | https://www.denverpost.com/2023/08/22/adam-frisch-lauren-boebert-poll-2024-race/
10024810 | 2023-12-29T13:08:37.582079Z | Trump Shares Poll Result Predicting 'Revenge' And 'Dictatorship' As Top Priorities | https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-poll-dictatorship-revenge_n_658beb48e4b0cd3cf0e41a98

I was assured there would be some that showed Biden behind in the polls, that the mods were trying to cover up...

It's a silly thing to get hung up on, but it helps to demonstrate that the person I'm talking with is talking about some situation that didn't happen in reality.

I think it's a pretty normal thing for one person to say "Anyone who tried to criticize Democrats gets banned" and one person to say "When did that happen?" It's not like I am hounding you to do my math homework. It was only in your mind that it blew up into a "task" for you to come up with an example.

Like I say, this is why I don't really go to lemmy.world. The rules are different. People make proclamations about how it is, and then get all bent out of shape if someone expresses skepticism, like it's a horrible unreasonable thing.

Feel free to take as much time as you need. I understand that finding examples of what you're talking about might be challenging. I support you in the mission.

(Edit: Oh, also, we're not on a phone call. Stepping away from Lemmy instead of replying to me, if you don't have a reply yet, is sort of implied in the asynchronous nature of the thing.)