Santa is a robot moderator. Santa will decide if you’re naughty or nice. Santa has no chill.

Hi everyone!

The slrpnk admins were nice enough to let me try a little moderation experiment. I made a moderation bot called Santa, which tries to ease the amount of busywork for moderators, and reduce the level of unpleasantness in conversations.

If someone’s interactions are attracting a lot of downvotes compared to their upvotes, they are probably not contributing to the community, even if they are not technically breaking any rules. That’s the simple core of it. Then, on top of that, the bot gives more weight to users that other people upvote frequently, so it is much more accurate than simply adding up the up and down vote totals. In testing, it seemed to do a pretty good job figuring out who was productive and not.

Most people upvote more than they downvote. To accumulate a largely negative opinion from the community, your content has to be very dislikable. The current configuration bans less than 3% of the users that it evaluates, but there are some vocal posters in that 3%, which is the whole point.

It is currently live and moderating !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net. It is experimental. Please don’t test it by posting bad content there. If you have a generally good posting history, it will probably let you get away with being obnoxious, and it won’t be a good test. Test it by posting good things that you think will attract real-life jerks, and let it test its banhammer against them instead of you.

FAQ

Q: What if I am banned?

A: You may be a jerk. Sorry you had to find out this way.

It’s not hard to accumulate more weighted upvotes than downvotes. In the current configuration, 97% of the users on Lemmy manage to do it. If you are one of the 3%, it is because the community consensus is that your content is more negative than positive.

It’s also possible that the pattern of voting arrived at some outcome for you that really isn’t fair. I studied the bot’s moderation decisions a lot, trying to get the algorithm right, but it’s impossible for any moderation system to be perfect. If you feel strongly that you were moderated unfairly, comment below and I’ll look into it and tell you some examples of things you posted that drew negative rank, and what I think of the bot’s decision.

Q: How long do bans last?

A: Bans are transient and based on user sentiment going back one month from the present day. If you have not posted much in the last month, even a single downvoted comment could result in a ban. That’s an unfortunate by-product of making it hard for throwaway accounts to cause problems. If that happened to you, it should be easy to reverse the ban in a few days by engaging and posting outside of the moderated community, showing good faith and engagement, and bringing your average back up.

If you are at all a frequent poster on Lemmy and received a ban, you might have some negative rank in your average, and your ban may be indefinite until your habitual type of postings and interactions changes, and your previous interactions age past the one month limit.

Q: How can I avoid getting banned?

A: Engage positively with the community, respect others’ opinions, and contribute constructively. Santabot’s algorithm values the sentiment of trusted community members, so positive interactions are key.

If you want to hear examples of positive and negative content from your history, let me know and I can help. Pure voting totals are not always a good guideline to what the bot is reacting to.

Q: How does it work?

A: The code is in a Codeberg repository. There’s a more detailed description of the algorithm there, or you can look at the code.

Q: Won’t this create an echo chamber?

A: It might. I looked at its moderation decisions a lot and it’s surprisingly tolerant of unpopular opinions as long as they’re accompanied by substantial posting outside of the unpopular opinion. More accurately, the Lemmy community is surprisingly tolerant of a wide range of opinions, and that consensus is reflected when the bot parses the global voting record.

If you’re only posting your unpopular opinion, or you tend to get in arguments about it, then that’s going to be an issue, much more so than someone who expresses an unusual opinion but still in a productive fashion.

Q: Won’t people learn to fake upvotes for themselves and trick the bot?

A: They might. The algorithm is resistant to it but not perfectly. I am worried about that, to be honest, much more than about the bot’s decisions about aboveboard users being wrong all that often.

What do you think?

It may sound like I’ve got it all figured out, but I don’t think I do. Please let me know what you think. The bot is live on !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net so come along and give it a try. Post controversial topics and see if the jerks arrive and overwhelm the bot. Or, just let me know in the comments. I’m curious what the community thinks.

Thank you!

Edit: I have retuned the bot and adjusted some numbers above to reflect its current configuration. It was based on pure parity of downvotes against upvotes, but it now weights downvotes more, so the number of users banned has gone up from about 0.5% to about 3%.