I mean any one could go find some examples from memory that they experienced. I could dig far enough into my comment history to find them. In-fact I was digging through some banned community members and found some examples just the other day.
What I’m doing is far, far larger in scope. I’m not trying to find one instance, I’m trying to find all of them. I’m also interested in correlating that to “shifts in the overall narrative” to the sub. And I’m trying to do this across several prominent subs. And I’m not doing this in an adhoc way. When I have results they’ll be publishable.
I’ve built some of the more important tools already which allow me to pull the entire comment history of a user and perform significant sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, etc… but some aspects aren’t reliable enough yet to be completely useful.
(scroll to the bottom, then scroll up instead of starting at the top)
The first analysis is a “trolling/ not trolling” analysis. Then its a frequency analysis. I used squid because of their preposterous number of comments. Some weeks they were commenting almost ever 3 minutes for hours on end.
If life we’re simpler I’d be further along on this project, but alas, the bills. They do not pay themselves. And its a hobby thing I’m not getting paid for, so its the last to get access to my time.
I’ve built some of the more important tools already which allow me to pull the entire comment history of a user and perform significant sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, etc… but some aspects aren’t reliable enough yet to be completely useful.
this sounds gross and very much like witch-hunting and stalking. yes, all comments are public but u coming up w a tool just to find someones and analyze and make judgement on them seems gross and out of line. think of how fasicst and controling that sounds. what if some republican was doing that and bragged about it? think about that
Ozma’s ban comes to mind pretty lazily. But I’m not trying to do additional work on your behalf right now. I just had a long day and I’m done working for now.
return2ozma was banned because he was posting a nonstop flood of articles, and admitted to the mods that he basically just searched out bad stories about Biden and posted them whatever they were (even some ones he didn’t try to defend any kind of factual accuracy of), to bring “balance.”
I actually don’t agree with making that the criterion. I think it’s of a piece with lots of types of lazy and unproductive moderation that happpens on lemmy.world. But, I definitely agreed with banning him, for the same reason that I would expect to be banned if I went to your favorite community and posted 15 stories a day about “Five things you won’t believe about what Biden accomplished during his term in office!” It’s not about the viewpoint being prohibited from anyone expressing it (and, of course, the fact that we’re having this conversation and you haven’t been banned for expressing criticism of the Democrats is an obvious counterexample to you trying to say that’s banned on LW). It’s about one person spamming to try to promote it.
But I’m not trying to do additional work on your behalf right now. I just had a long day and I’m done working for now.
You said anyone could do it, you said it was super easy, just from memory. We’d be having a different conversation if you’d said “Anyone who felt like taking a bunch of time away from their job could probably put together a script to comb through the whole database to find the single example you’re looking for, because I’m sure at least one exists, although I can’t do that whole endeavor right now I’m confident that it would work if someone did do it. I’m very tired and such a thing would be horrifying and unfair if someone asked me to do it. I just know some other person who had a lot of energy to spare could.”
I mean this isn’t really a conversation. this has been me asking as gracefully as I can to step away from the conversation and come back to it another time, and you insisting on continuing.
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.)
(back at work and on a real key board now so I can do longer formed responses)
But this is also why we need the tools I’m building. What I’m talking about can only really be “witnessed”, outside of anectdata, in the aggregate. If you wanted to help, I’m need to find specific instances of this happening and 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 (regardless of if you agree with the editorial bias or not, I think we take jordan at their word). Agreeing with the political bias of the ban, doesn’t mean it wasn’t an example of an authority (a mod) using that authority to structure the political narratives of the commons, which is what I’m trying to identify.
Specifically, there are a few mods who regularly were getting into flaming arguments which would result in them banning the counter party. flyingsquid was notorious for this, and its a task I need to do to validate a system for automatically identifying its occurrence. I need a couple real examples, so if you find any, send them my way. Some other good subs to look for are c/world and c/political_memes. Squid would regularly flame people then ban them.
And as far as “endless stream”; thanks, because that gave me another task to put on the to do list. What Ozma got banned for isn’t actually what I’m really looking for (although it could be, but its beyond my original scope). What I’m really looking for are bans related to things that happen in the comments. 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. That’s a much more difficult process though, but I’m sure in review we’d get asked why we didn’t do that.
so can u tell me more about this project wen u have time? I previously commented to you that I think it’s sick. but are you using it to attack users or to find out bad mod actions and proof of mods and admins and people like @PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au who obsess and witchhunt people they disagree with?
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.
happened plenty and you guys still witchhunt people who didn’t seem to worship everything dem lol luckilly lemmy is so dencentralize that they don’t have to be silenced no matte rhow much u wish they were
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.
So anyone can look it up, but in order to look it up, you’d have to build some tools and it’s a whole project?
I mean any one could go find some examples from memory that they experienced. I could dig far enough into my comment history to find them. In-fact I was digging through some banned community members and found some examples just the other day.
What I’m doing is far, far larger in scope. I’m not trying to find one instance, I’m trying to find all of them. I’m also interested in correlating that to “shifts in the overall narrative” to the sub. And I’m trying to do this across several prominent subs. And I’m not doing this in an adhoc way. When I have results they’ll be publishable.
I’ve built some of the more important tools already which allow me to pull the entire comment history of a user and perform significant sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, etc… but some aspects aren’t reliable enough yet to be completely useful.
This is some example output using flyingsqids data: https://tmpweb.net/jS19ePfgNdz0/
(scroll to the bottom, then scroll up instead of starting at the top)
The first analysis is a “trolling/ not trolling” analysis. Then its a frequency analysis. I used squid because of their preposterous number of comments. Some weeks they were commenting almost ever 3 minutes for hours on end.
If life we’re simpler I’d be further along on this project, but alas, the bills. They do not pay themselves. And its a hobby thing I’m not getting paid for, so its the last to get access to my time.
this sounds gross and very much like witch-hunting and stalking. yes, all comments are public but u coming up w a tool just to find someones and analyze and make judgement on them seems gross and out of line. think of how fasicst and controling that sounds. what if some republican was doing that and bragged about it? think about that
Could you find some examples from memory that you experienced, for me?
I feel like we keep having the same conversation here.
Ozma’s ban comes to mind pretty lazily. But I’m not trying to do additional work on your behalf right now. I just had a long day and I’m done working for now.
return2ozma was banned because he was posting a nonstop flood of articles, and admitted to the mods that he basically just searched out bad stories about Biden and posted them whatever they were (even some ones he didn’t try to defend any kind of factual accuracy of), to bring “balance.”
I actually don’t agree with making that the criterion. I think it’s of a piece with lots of types of lazy and unproductive moderation that happpens on lemmy.world. But, I definitely agreed with banning him, for the same reason that I would expect to be banned if I went to your favorite community and posted 15 stories a day about “Five things you won’t believe about what Biden accomplished during his term in office!” It’s not about the viewpoint being prohibited from anyone expressing it (and, of course, the fact that we’re having this conversation and you haven’t been banned for expressing criticism of the Democrats is an obvious counterexample to you trying to say that’s banned on LW). It’s about one person spamming to try to promote it.
You said anyone could do it, you said it was super easy, just from memory. We’d be having a different conversation if you’d said “Anyone who felt like taking a bunch of time away from their job could probably put together a script to comb through the whole database to find the single example you’re looking for, because I’m sure at least one exists, although I can’t do that whole endeavor right now I’m confident that it would work if someone did do it. I’m very tired and such a thing would be horrifying and unfair if someone asked me to do it. I just know some other person who had a lot of energy to spare could.”
I mean this isn’t really a conversation. this has been me asking as gracefully as I can to step away from the conversation and come back to it another time, and you insisting on continuing.
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.)
(back at work and on a real key board now so I can do longer formed responses)
But this is also why we need the tools I’m building. What I’m talking about can only really be “witnessed”, outside of anectdata, in the aggregate. If you wanted to help, I’m need to find specific instances of this happening and 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 (regardless of if you agree with the editorial bias or not, I think we take jordan at their word). Agreeing with the political bias of the ban, doesn’t mean it wasn’t an example of an authority (a mod) using that authority to structure the political narratives of the commons, which is what I’m trying to identify.
Specifically, there are a few mods who regularly were getting into flaming arguments which would result in them banning the counter party. flyingsquid was notorious for this, and its a task I need to do to validate a system for automatically identifying its occurrence. I need a couple real examples, so if you find any, send them my way. Some other good subs to look for are c/world and c/political_memes. Squid would regularly flame people then ban them.
And as far as “endless stream”; thanks, because that gave me another task to put on the to do list. What Ozma got banned for isn’t actually what I’m really looking for (although it could be, but its beyond my original scope). What I’m really looking for are bans related to things that happen in the comments. 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. That’s a much more difficult process though, but I’m sure in review we’d get asked why we didn’t do that.
so can u tell me more about this project wen u have time? I previously commented to you that I think it’s sick. but are you using it to attack users or to find out bad mod actions and proof of mods and admins and people like @PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au who obsess and witchhunt people they disagree with?
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.)
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:
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:
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
happened plenty and you guys still witchhunt people who didn’t seem to worship everything dem lol luckilly lemmy is so dencentralize that they don’t have to be silenced no matte rhow much u wish they were
Find a particular modlog entry from last year. See how long it takes.
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_658beb48e4b0cd3cf0e41a98I 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.
Guess lemmy isn’t a dog-slow pain in the ass for you. How nice.
No, I just know scripting