[email protected] is live! If you missed the previous discussion, it’s a community with a robot moderator that bans you if the community doesn’t like your comments, even if you’re not “breaking the rules.” The hope is to have a politics community without the arguing. [email protected] has an in-depth explanation of how it works.
I was trying to keep the algorithm a secret, to make it more difficult to game the system, but the admins convinced me that basically nobody would participate if they could be banned by a secret system they couldn’t know anything about. I posted the code as open source. It works like PageRank, by aggregating votes and assigning trust to users based on who the community trusts and banning users with too low a trust level.
I’ve also rebalanced the tuning of the algorithm and worked on it more. It now bans a tiny number of users (108 in total right now), but still including a lot of obnoxious accounts. There are now no slrpnk users banned. It’s a lot of lemmy.world people, a few from lemmy.ml or lemm.ee, and a scattering from other places.
Check it out! Let me know what you think.
I know, I know. I can’t figure out whether starting out with a political community represents a good real-world test, or a hopeless impossibility. Let’s see.
Have fun watching conservatives/fascists/tankies vote opposing commentors into the ban box like they do in the real world anywhere they have power.
I think this is more difficult than you are thinking it is. PageRank based trust rankings are not infallible but they are a lot more resistant to abuse than what Lemmy communities do now, and it’s all happening in public, so if something screwy is happening with the bans, it’s always possible to audit where the wrong judgements came from.