archomrade [he/him]

I use this for architecture and it’s saved me so much time

Do these streams typically use public domain IP? I imagine some publishers wouldn’t much like their work being read ‘for free’

“I have a girlfriend but she lives in Canada and doesn’t have any socials”

If i’m understanding the last graph right, it’s showing the total number of active monthly users per instance’s top communities, filtered by the overall top 100 communities?

So if an instance has activity spread out over many niche communities, that activity isn’t represented on this graph?

I would think having a diversity of smaller communities is more in-line with the spirit of the fediverse, I’m not sure of the value in slicing the data in this way.

Oh is it time for another defed campaign already?

If Amazon started charging for smart-home solutions, they’d essentially be making the case for FOSS solutions like home assistant.

Granted, there will always be a contingent of people who are unwilling to learn how to self-manage that tech, but there are certainly enough people who are willing that they should think twice about heading down that path.

Right now, the model in most communities is banning people with unpopular political opinions or who are uncivil. Anyone else can come in and do whatever they like, even if a big majority of the community has decided they’re doing more harm than good.

You don’t need a social credit tracking system to auto-ban users if there’s a big majority of the community that recognizes the user as problematic: you could manually ban them, or use a ban voting system, or use the bot to flag users that are potentially problematic to assist on manual-ban determinations, or hand out automated warnings… Especially if you’re only looking at 1-2% of problematic users, is that really so many that you can’t review them independently?

Users behave differently in different communities… Preemptively banning someone for activity in another community is already problematic because it assumes they’d behave in the same way in the other, but now it’s for activity that is ill-defined and aggregated over many hundreds or thousands of comments. There’s a reason why each community has their rules clearly spelled out in the side, it’s because they each have different expectations and users need those expectations spelled out if they have any chance of following them.

I’m sure your ranking system is genius and perfectly tuned to the type of user you find the most problematic - your data analysis genius is noted. The problem with automated ranking systems isn’t that they’re bad at what they claim to be doing, it’s that they’re undemocratic and dehumanizing and provide little recourse for error, and when applied at large scales those problems become amplified and systemic.

You seem to be convinced ahead of time that this system is going to censor opposing views, ignoring everything I’ve done to address the concern and indicate that it is a valid concern.

That isn’t my concern with your implementation, it’s that it limits the ability to defend opposing views when they occur. Consensus views don’t need to be defended against aggressive opposition, because they’re already presumed to be true; a dissenting view will nearly always be met with hostile opposition (especially when it regards a charged political topic), and by penalizing defenses of those positions you allow consensus views remain unopposed. I don’t particularly care to defend my own record, but since you provided them it’s worth pointing out that all of the penalized examples you listed of my user were in response to hostile opposition and character accusations. The positively ranked comments were within the consensus view (like you said), so of course they rank positively. I’m also tickled that one of them was a comment critiquing exactly the kind of arbitrary moderation policies like the one you’re defending now.

f you see it censoring any opposing views, please let me know, because I don’t want it to do that either.

Even if I wasn’t on the ban list and could see it I wouldn’t have any interest in critiquing its ban choices because that isn’t the problem I have with it.

I already said I don’t take issue with any one decision, I care about the macro social implications.

You’re free to provide examples, but like I said it’s not the specific moderation choices that are the problem, it’s using public sentiment as a core part of that determination.

The problem is that somehow you wind up in long heated arguments with “centrists” which wander away from the topic and get personal

I’m not surprised I was identified by the bot, but it’s worth pointing out that ending up in heated arguments happens because people disagree. Those things are related. If someone is getting into lots of lengthy disagreements that are largely positive but devolve into the unwanted behavior, doesn’t that at least give legitimacy to the concern that dissenting opinions are being penalized simply because they attract a lot of impassioned disagreement? Even if both participants in that disagreement are penalized, that just means any disagreement that may already be present isn’t given opportunity to play out. Your community would just be lots of people politely agreeing not to disagree.

I have no problem with wanting to build a community around a particular set of acceptable behaviors -I don’t even take issue with trying to quantify that behavior and automating it. But we shouldn’t pretend as if doing so doesn’t have unintended polarizing consequences.

A community that allows for disagreement but limits argumentation isn’t neutral - it gives preferences to status-quo and consensus positions by limiting the types of dissent allowed. If users aren’t able to resolve conflicting perspectives through argumentation, then the consensus view ends up being left uncontested (at least not meaningfully). That isn’t a problem if the intent of the community is to enforce decorum so that contentious argumentation happens elsewhere, but if a majority of communities utilizes a similar moderation policy then of course it is going to result in siloing.

I might also point out that an argument that is drawn out over dozens of comments and ends in that ‘unwanted’ behavior you’re looking for isn’t all that visible to most users; if you’re someone who is trying to avoid ‘jerks’ then I would think the relative nested position/visibility of that activity should be important. I’m not sure how your bot weighs activity against that visibility, but I think even that doubt that brings into question the effectiveness of this as a strategy.

Again, not challenging the specific moderation choices the bot has made, just pointing out the problem of employing this type of moderation on a large scale. As it has been employed in this particular community is interesting.

I know this will ring hollow, considering I am (predictably) on the autoban list, but:

I don’t know how this isn’t a political-echochamber speedrun any%. People downvote posts and comments for a lot of reasons, and a big one (maybe the biggest one in a political community) is general disagreement/dislike, even simply extreme abstract mistrust. This is basically just crowdsourced vibes-based moderation.

Then again, I think communities are allowed to moderate/gatekeep their own spaces however the like. I see little difference between this practice and .ml or lemmygrad preemptively banning users based on comments made on other communities. In fact, I expect the same bot deployed on .ml or hexbear would end up banning the most impassioned centrist users from .world and kbin, and it would result in an accelerated silo-ing of the fediverse if it were applied at scale. Each community has a type of user they find the most disagreeable, and the more this automod is allowed to run the more each space will end up being defined by that perceived opposition.

Little doubt I would find the consensus-view unpalatable in a space like that, so no skin off my nose.

if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

This is the most beautiful thing I’ve read all year

Weird, I’m getting the same argument from those who think liberals are too lazy to push their candidate away from indefensible foreign policy

It’s not a matter of being ok with another country abusing their neighbors, nor is it about ‘letting them do what they want’, it’s about acknowledging the mutually assured destruction established during the cold war and having to reckon with the fact that there are other nations with the ability to end civilization that have other ambitions than you.

Leftists get mocked a lot about their pie-in-the-sky economic goals, but at least they have an intimate understanding of international conflict and the reality of oppositional superpowers. Unlike sheltered american adolescents who’ve never left their country for more than a week and have been assured their entire life that the US is the most powerful and moral nation on earth.

And that’s to say nothing about the fact that america is the antagonist to most other nations on the planet.

The alternative to this “line in the sand” is the eventual destruction of all things beautiful and good at the hands of the world’s most evil people.

Lmao who’s being naive?

The existence of nukes takes direct military intervention off the table, full stop. Diplomacy is the only way unless a nuclear exchange is acceptable to you.

The US is so privileged that they don’t realize that “just sit back and let it happen” is how the rest of the world has had to deal with them for the last 80 years, and now it’s unconscionable to think they have to ‘let it happen’ with a foreign adversary themselves

I think the world would be better if every country had nukes and countries like Russia, Israel, and the US couldn’t simply steamroll every other country standing in their way.

We can’t let the threat of nukes keep us from doing anything and allowing for Russia and China to just invade anywhere they want.

I’m sorry, but yes-we-fucking-can.

Jesus, people here are so fucking blood thirsty that they’re willing to entertain nuclear-fucking-holocaust just to ‘draw a line in the sand’

Friendly reminder that the US has already been ‘invading anywhere they want’ - I sure am glad the baddies aren’t as eager as the good guys are to glass half the planet.

Fair point, Margot Robbie

lol he’s saying you would be lecturing the guy you name-dropped for the things he’s known for saying if he was in here.

People loudly critiquing Biden and threatening to withhold support is an effort to push for progress, and condemning those people and their method instead of joining their protest to bring the progress being pushed for absolutely undercuts that message. It is exactly what MLK and Malcom X and Frederick Douglass wrote about repeatedly.

No progress has ever been made in the US by silently resigning to the lesser of evils, it has only ever been brought by loud, disruptive agitation by dedicated civil activists (including Douglass).

Or are you saying you think my single line about Douglas emcompases[sic] his entire career?

I’m saying your use of his name is nearly a 1-1 reversal of his actual historical significance. Frederick Douglass himself fought against a ‘less than perfect candidate’ until that candidate capitulated. I think it is safe to suggest that the abolition of slavery would not have happened without Douglass’ loud opposition to Lincoln.