It seems like you were perfectly happy to engage in arguments, when it was you outputting the argument. At me. When asked about engaging in a rational discussion, you bailed, with contempt at the concept.

Annnnd that's why you are banned. Like I say, the bot is working.

Sure. Here's you. Red is downvotes, blue is upvotes. The left-right axis is time, with the past on the left.

The bar right below the red/blue bar code is the key to what comments were in what posts.

One thing that jumps out at me is that almost all of your participation is in political threads, and the majority of it is getting downvoted. It would be different if you were just participating in Lemmy, and then also you had some views that were unpopular. That happens to a lot of people, and I've bent over backwards trying to preserve their right to do that when I've been making and tuning the bot. This isn't that. This is almost all just you going in and arguing with people.

One thing I say a lot when talking to people about this is, "It's not your opinion, it's your delivery." I'm going to be honest, when I read your first message here, it annoyed me. You're coming out of the gate hostile. Most people, when they receive that, are going to be hostile back. It's just how people work. You're not going to convince them of your point of view, you're not going to be able to fine-tune your own point of view to let them poke holes in any mistakes in it. You're just going to irritate everyone. That's a choice you're making in how you approach things, and I think it's completely fair for people to react to that choice by closing the door on you.

It's the difference between going to a party when you're in a fringe political party, and having conversations about it, versus showing up to the party with a bunch of flyers and handing one to every person and making almost every conversation over the course of the night revolve around your chosen fringe political party. The first one is fine, or should be, at a decent party. The second one, people are going to remove you from the party for. I think if you want to make an impact on people's thinking, you're going to need to recognize and respect that reality of human nature.

Having an unpopular political opinion is fine. Being a little bit combative with people is fine. Doing both at once is going to collect a tidal wave of downvotes, and also I think is going to make it harder for you to make any progress convincing anyone of anything.

I regularly get dozens of downvotes for such hot takes as “facilitating genocide hurts the dems chances of getting elected, we need them to stop that if we want them to win.”.

I'm going to stop you right there.

You're playing a little game where you claim you said one thing and got downvoted for it, when I can guarantee you actually said something different. You probably said that we need to not vote for the Democrats, because they're facilitating genocide. That's different. You can say that, sure. Someone might say back to you that not voting for the Democrats is going to make the genocide 20 times worse, and that's why they're voting for the Democrats. They can say that, too. That's progress, that's people talking to each other. Maybe one or the other of you will learn something from the exchange.

Where it gets difficult is where you go off into this alternate reality where they said, "I love genocide, and I love the Democrats, I'm going to give you downvotes because you don't support genocide which I love," and then you start arguing against that thing that they didn't say. That's not progress. That's just people shouting and trying to twist the conversation around so that they can "win." It only takes a little bit of that before people are going to stop talking to you.

I know you do that, because you did it to me in your first message in this conversation.

I looked over some of your posting history, and I think you've got some valuable things to say. I learned some things about how bad Liz Cheney was before she for some reason found her principles and broke with the Republican party over Trump. I saw some debates people were having with you about Russian and Chinese history, where I don't think you're right, but it didn't seem like any kind of badly intentioned thing.

I think if you built up the habit of always responding honestly to what people said, and telling the truth about your own views and the world outside the best way you can, the bot wouldn't treat you harshly, and you'd also make more progress in convincing people of what you're trying to say.

Try again: What's the last thing you said that got dozens of downvotes, and what did you actually say that got dozens of downvotes? What was the opposing side's core argument, honestly summarized?

So it would delete people’s posts if they get downvoted a lot

No.

or if the poster tends to upvote heavily downvoted posts?

No.

You’ve automated the suppression of dissenting voices.

Am not.

It's a perfectly fair concern. I'm trying to be careful to make sure I'm not doing that. There's quite a lot of explanation in the FAQ, and some conversations you can look back over with people who were concerned, because they've had experience with exactly that happening to them.

At one point I tried to illustrate with data just how big a jerk you have to be before it starts banning you. If you're interested, I can start doing that again. Being a dissenting voice on its own is nowhere near enough to anger the bot. You can look over !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net and see quite a few dissenting voices. I've also offered to delve, for any user who feels that this has happened to them, into the breakdown of why they're being ranked down, which almost always is because they're being a jerk about their "dissenting" opinion, and not the opinion itself.

Also, I think it's hilarious that someone coming from lemmy.ml is accusing me of trying to suppress dissenting voices. Lemmy.ml has been suppressing dissenting voices since its inception. The degree to which I'm bending over backwards not to suppress dissenting voices is something I think you should absorb and carry over to the lemmy.ml moderators as a good replacement for their current banhammer circus.

If they manage to hit 5% of the vote this election, which of course would mean a Trump win, then they will in no way, shape, or form have guaranteed ballot access in the next election. They'll be lucky if they aren't in prison or worse.

This person who's going around calling herself a socialist, and also risking Trump getting elected, is showing an incredible level of thick-headed cluelessness as to what he plans to have the police and military do to anything that looks any type of left-wing, over the course of his second term.

They also won't hit 5%, but that's not even the main concern here.

I'm saying that the bot is incorrect. Look up any pro-Palestinian or -Arab source on it, and you'll find a pretty bald-faced statement that it is factually suspect, because its viewpoint is anti-Israel. Look up the New York Times, which regularly reports factually untrue things, including one which caused a major journalistic scandal near the beginning of the war in Gaza, and check its factual rating.

Every report of bias is from somebody's point of view. That part I have no issue with. Pretending that a source is or isn't factual depending on whether it matches your particular bias is something different entirely.

It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes

It all just suddenly clicked into place for me.

I think there's a strong possibility that you're right. It would explain all the tortured explanations for why the bot is necessary, coupled with the absolute determination to keep it regardless of how much negative feedback it's getting. Looking at it as a little ad included in every comments section makes the whole thing make sense in a way that, taken at face value, it doesn't.

Most people don't want the bot to be there, because they don't agree with its opinion about what is "biased." It claims factually solid sources are non-factual if they don't agree with the author's biases, and it overlooks significant editing of the truth in sources that agree with the author's biases.

In addition, one level up the meta, opposition to the bot has become a fashionable way to rebel against the moderation, which is always a crowd pleaser. The fact that the politics moderators keep condescendingly explaining that they're just looking out for the best interests of the community, and the bot is obviously a good thing and the majority of the community that doesn't want it is getting their pretty little heads confused about things, instigates a lot of people to smash the downvote button reflexively whenever they see its posts.

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.

The code for the bot is open source. It's not an AI model. It's based on a classical technique for analyzing networks of relative trust and turning them into a master list of community trust, combined with a lot of studying its output and tweaking parameters. The documentation is sparse, but if someone is skilled in these things they can probably take a few hours to study it and its conclusions and see what's going on.

If you're interested in looking at it for real, I can write some better documentation for the algorithm parts, which will probably be necessary to make sense of it beyond the surface level.

I completely agree with you on that. "Pleasant" might have been a misleading way for me to frame the community. As far as the bot is concerned, you're free to be as unfriendly to fascists as you want.

As a matter of fact, part of what I think is wrong with the current moderation model is the emphasis on "civility." I think you should be allowed to be unfriendly.

I'll give an example: I spent some time talking with existing moderators as I was tweaking and testing the bot, and we got in a discussion about two specific users. One of them, the bot was banning, and the other it wasn't. The moderator I was talking with pointed it out and said that my bot was getting it backwards, because the one user was fine, and the other user was getting in arguments and drawing a lot of user reports. I looked at what was going on, and pointed out that the first user was posting some disingenuous claims that were drawing tons of hate and disagreement from almost the entire rest of the community, that would start big arguments that didn't go anywhere. The second user was being rude sometimes, but it was a small issue from the point of view of the rest of the community, and usually I think the people they were being rude to were in the wrong anyway.

The current moderation model leaves the first user alone, even if they want to post their disingenuous stuff ten times a day, and dings the second user because they are "uncivil." I think that's backwards. Of course if someone's being hostile to everyone, that's a problem, but I think a lot of bad behavior that makes politics communities bad doesn't fit the existing categories for moderation very well, and relying on volunteer moderators who are short on time to make snap judgements about individual users and comments is not a good approach to applying the rules even as they are.

So come in and be impolite to the fascists. Go nuts. You don't have to be pleasant in that sense. In fact, I think you'll probably have more freedom to do that here than in other communities.

My absolute favorite is the one where to redeem their money from the transfer agency, the scammers have to navigate through a labyrinthine phone tree maze that never leads anywhere. He releases them to wander their way through it and just keeps statistics on how long they spend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWzz3NeDz3E

He ran into someone who had dealt with it before, and started talking about transferring money through this system and the guy started protesting and sounded so defeated. "Oh, it's so easy," he says, and the guy sounds just purely defeated and horrified as he says "No, no ma'am, I do not think it is easy..."

I am a big fan of Kitboga's work.