They are not owed our votes - they must effectively campaign to win them. That’s politics.

You aren’t owed life, or shelter, food every day, or freedom from imprisonment from no reason. Or from torture. Nobody outside yourself has any obligation to create for you a system that you like.

We made all this up, all this justice, flawed or not. We create it every day. Except now it might be about to go away. We either get together and create and sustain it, or it can blow away like a fart in the wind.

That’s realpolitik. Welcome to it, and congratulations.

Good news! Trump is planning to point a huge amount of anger at the Democrats as soon as he gets into office. Jack Smith, Joe Biden, Laetitia James, and who knows who else will probably get federal charges which will probably succeed.

I’m glad to hear you are united with that anger. I’m sure it will help us maintain the two-party system. What’s your next step, once those obstacles to the two-party system are cleared out of the way?

We are protesting the end of American democracy.

The time for infighting is done. I don’t see what complaining about the DNC accomplishes at this stage.

I think you can apply the same thing to anyone from the DNC who wants to talk about Latino or Arab voters who didn’t vote for the Democrat. It’s all just irrelevant at this point. It’s solidarity and survival time. I don’t care whether you think it’s this person’s fault or this other person’s fault.

I think some of it was for DM harrassment or posting fan fiction about other people on Lemmy.

Again, assumption. And no, none of that ever happened.

Modlog, search for “harassing.”

Good to know, maybe I missed the tone in your text. I def took it as you were trying to ban me from this instance, lemm.ee, and sh.itjust.works because of what you thought of my previous behavior on an instance that I was banned from weeks ago. Since you are writing to all of the admins there.

That is exactly what I was trying to do, yes. Not for your behavior on the previous instances exactly, but for starting up the same behavior from new accounts since you’d already been banned for it, which is against the rules. I think I explained the commonsense reasons also.

And you can easily not “endure” me by blocking my name.

Part of the point of the violation here is that, if someone’s already blocked your name, they now have to do it again for three new accounts, until you make more beyond those three.

I already think that trolling and saying that anyone who doesn’t like it should just block you is unreasonable. Trolling and saying that anyone who doesn’t like it needs to block every new account you make to keep trolling with when one gets banned is a whole different level.

Sending out ban notifications to dozens of users about bans in a community they’ve never heard of doesn’t seem like good bot design.

I am unsurprised that a UniversalMonk fan would think that would be a totally reasonable thing to do, though, and at the same time that banning someone who managed to get an account ban from the least ban-happy instance there is when they make a new account and start doing the same stuff is somehow unreasonable.

Your ban is in the modlog. It’s about halfway down, search for “pleasant”.

I’m mostly relying on common sense here. Your participation in previous politics communities was incredibly obnoxious. The issue was never that you were talking about third parties and posting news articles. I don’t even know all the details of why you were banned. I think some of it was for DM harrassment or posting fan fiction about other people on Lemmy. Now that you’ve been banned, you’ve made new accounts and went looking for new politics communities to start doing the same thing in, while seeking for exact clarifications about the rules that would let you carefully adhere to the letter of them so you could keep doing it, while the overwhelming majority of the community keeps asking you not to.

I’m not trying to be mean about it, and I’m not upset or anything. If you’re interested in changing how you contribute so that you’re a net positive to the community, let’s talk. If you’re planning to continue your current type of contributions, but trying to engineer ways around the rules with multiple accounts or whatever so that you can keep doing it, then the answer is no thank you.

As I said under the other post, I do believe this evasion was entirely unintentional, for the reasons you outlined. The part that was intentional was trolling in lemmy.world politics and some other communities until your whole user got banned, and then making new accounts and going looking for other politics communities to start up exactly the same antics in, explicitly affirming your plan to continue the same pattern of behavior. And, in the course of doing that, you managed to break some rules, set up to protect against that kind of behavior.

I’m not planning to set the bot up to notify dozens of users about their bans in a community they have never posted in and don’t care about. Mostly it doesn’t come up, because you have to be pretty obnoxious for the bot to ban you. Almost no one even close to that boundary even posts there, because almost everyone understands how to interact with other users without collecting hundreds or thousands of downvotes.

I get that you didn’t get a notification, and so probably didn’t know you were banned. You did know you were being obnoxious previously, and refused to stop doing it until it escalated to an account ban, and then made some new accounts and started looking for new places to do it.

I think admins and mods those new places can make the decision about whether that is ban evasion, or whether they want to let you do this all again until you inevitably get banned again sometime later. People have talked with you about why what you’re doing is a problem. Why they would pick that second option is something of a mystery to me, but I’ll leave it up to them. I’m just relaying the information.

It would be a different story if you were just misunderstanding something, and completely open to a conversation about why you keep getting banned and what you can do differently, but you’re clearly more interested in figuring out the details of the rules so you can find ways around them and keep doing your same thing.

Fully agree. I’m finishing up a few replies to other people who had things to say about it, and then I plan to wash my hands of it.

This is a really good point. I was going to get sucked into replying after his innocent-faced reply, but there’s really no point to it.

They were banned from [email protected] ages ago, and just now starting posting new stuff there under new accounts.

You could be charitable and say that they probably didn’t understand how Pleasant Politics works, and had no idea that they were banned.

Or, you could say that this user has such a clear pattern of badly-intended participation that this is clearly in the spirit of ban evasion regardless.

To me, it would be different if they were coming with a post apologizing about trying to antagonize the whole community, and promising to be less toxic in their future interactions, and asking for a second chance. They’re not doing that. The fact that they’re not even bothering, just saying that they plan to continue the same obnoxious conduct as before, trying to innocently claim that they didn’t mean anything by it, and avowing to skirt carefully within the letter of the law, would mean that common sense would motivate a ban regardless and they don’t deserve any extra leeway when rules are broken, even if it was honestly unintentional in this case.

It’s up to you. In my opinion no good can come of having this person involved for as long as they really want to defend their right to troll, but it’s up to you.

The bot banned you from [email protected] I don’t know how long ago. You had a lower rank, after a while, than even Media Bias Fact Check bot. Somehow. That’s your violation of the letter of the law.

I can’t even find the entry in the modlog because your record of moderation actions is so extensive that it’s almost impossible to make sense of. I seriously tried, and since your account ban and the endless list of deletions and bans people have been giving you, I couldn’t find it. It’s hard to find stuff for now-deleted accounts, I guess. It’s there though. You were banned quite a while ago from [email protected] under the now-deleted account. I can find a date or a moderation record if you want to see it. Anyway, you put yourself in a position to be able to DM people again after being banned for some kind of offense in DMs, and started posting in new politics communities with the exact same stuff after being banned for a pattern of behavior that I would say the mods were excessively generous about, to the point of moderation malpractice. That’s your violation of the spirit of the law.

You did ban evasion both in letter and in spirit. And, you’re pretending with an innocent face not to understand how anyone could have a negative reaction to you, when you’re clearly aiming for exactly that negative reaction with a lot of your past posts. That’s the proactive element that would lead me, if I were an admin, to ban you on sight.

You need to reevaluate your approach to posting, or else get accustomed to people wanting to ban you. It’s the world’s most natural reaction to what you like doing.

Being the same person who was banned, and posting from a new account, is ban evasion.

You can find a place that can put up with you, if you want to try. That’s the sense in which your voice won’t be silenced. The same people who’ve seen what you have to say and want no part of it are not obligated to continue listening to it forever, with you disabling their attempts not to hear from you anymore. That’s protecting their rights to use Lemmy as they want to use it.

You’re welcome to your dickness. The name is terrible. It just means no trolls.

@[email protected] I don’t know where to put this for sh.itjust.works, so I’m picking an admin at random.

It’s possible. I think it’s more difficult than people think. You have to do it on a scale which is blatantly obvious to anyone who’s looking, so you’re just inviting a ban.

One person swore to me that it would be really easy, so I invited them to try, and they made a gang of bots which farmed karma and then mass-downvoted me, trying to get me banned from my own place. If you look at my profile you’ll see some things which have -300 score because of it. I welcomed the effort, since I’m interested in how well it will resist that kind of attack. Their first effort did exactly nothing, because none of the downvote bots had any rank within the algorithm. I gave them some pointers on how they could improve for a second time around, and they went radio silent and I haven’t heard from them since then.

You’re fine. Why would you not be? You left 15 comments in the last month, and they were all upvoted. It doesn’t even really have much to go on to rank you, but your rank is positive, nowhere near 0, much less far enough into the negative side that it would need to be to even be greylisted.

99% of Lemmy is made of acceptable citizens. That’s a real number. Only 1% of the users that it evaluates, which is itself only a tiny fraction of the total Lemmy population, ever get blacklisted. You have to be very obnoxious before it starts targeting you. I can understand the worry that this is going to arbitrarily start attacking people because of some vague AI bot decision, but that’s not what is happening.

The visualization of someone’s social credit score just picks the 5 most impactful posts, it doesn’t discriminate based on positive or negative. If you want to see what the red corresponds to on my graph, the most negative things I have done within the time window are:

• https://slrpnk.net/comment/11257933
• https://slrpnk.net/comment/11257387

They both contributed some red to the graph, I think. The red at the far right end is comments within this post that people are taking exception to.

The core algorithm, a robust way to determine global trust rankings based on a network of relative trust, was first codified and used for this purpose in the late 1800s. It would be difficult to come up with a way to attack this problem that is further separated from the era of AI algorithms. I think you would need help from a math historian.

Does that mean hostile but popular comments in the wrong communities would have a pass though?

They have no effect. The impact of someone’s upvote is dependent on how much trust from the wider community that person has. It’s a huge recursive formula, almost the same as PageRank. The upshot is that those little isolated wrong communities have no power unless the wider community also gives them some upvotes. It’s a very clever algorithm. I like it a lot.

For normal minority communities like vegans, that’s not a problem. They still get some upvotes, because the occasional conflict isn’t the normal state, so they count as normal users. They post stuff, people generally upvote more than they downvote by about 10 to 1, and they are their own separate thing, which is fine. For minority communities that are totally isolated from interactions with the wider community, they just have more or less 0 rank, so it doesn’t matter what they think. They’re not banned, unless they’ve done something, but their votes do almost nothing. For minority communities that constantly pick fights with the wider community, they tend to have negative rank, so it also doesn’t matter what they think, in terms of the impact of them mutually upvoting each other.

I think it might be a good idea to set up “canary” communities, vegans being a great example, with the bot posting warnings if users from those communities start to get ranked down. That can be a safety check to make sure it is working the way it’s supposed to. Even if that downranking does happen, it might be fine, if their behavior is obnoxious and the community is reacting with downvotes, or it might be a sign of a problem. You have to look up people’s profiles and look at the details. In general, people on Lemmy don’t spend very much time going into the vegan community and spreading hate and downvotes just for the sake of hatred, because they saw some vegans being vegans. Usually there’s some reason for it.

One thing that definitely does happen is people from that minority community going out and picking fights with the wider community, and then beginning to make a whining sound when the reaction is negative, and claiming that the heat they’re getting is because of their viewpoint, and not because they’re being obnoxious. That happens quite a lot.

I think some of the instances that police and ban dissent set up a bad expectation for their users. People from there feel like their tribe is being attacked if they have to come into contact a viewpoint that they’re been told is the “wrong” one, and then they make these blanket proclamations about how their own point of view is God’s truth while attacking anyone who disagrees, and then they sincerely don’t expect the hostile response that they get. I think some of them sincerely feel silenced when that happens. I don’t know what to do about that other than be transparent and supportive about where the door to being able to post is, if they want to go through it, and otherwise minimizing the amount that they can irritate everyone else for as long as that’s their MO.

I still think that instead of the bot considering all of Lemmy as one community it would be better if moderators can provide focus for it because there are differences in values between instances and communities that I think should reflect in the moderation decisions that are taken.

It definitely does that. It just uses a more sophisticated metric for “value” than a hard-coding of which are the good communities and which are the bad ones.

I think the configuration options to give more weight or primacy to certain communities are still in the code. I’m not sure. I do see what you’re saying. I think it might be wise for me, if anyone does wind up wanting to play with this, to give as many tools as possible to moderators who want to use it, and just let them make the decision. I think the bot is capable of working without needing configuration which ones are the good communities, but if someone can replicate my checking into it, they’ll be happier with the outcome whether or not they wind up with the same conclusions as me.

And yes, definitely making it advisory to the moderators, instead of its own autonomous AI drone banhammer, will increase people’s trust.

The tool that detects unreasonable people and is effective at combatting them, a whole lot of unreasonable people really don’t like, and they’re being really unreasonable in how they approach the conversation. Go figure.

It wouldn’t be hard to make it work on PieFed. A first step, having it load up the voting flow patterns and make its judgements, would be very easy. It just needs a PieFed version of db.py, it would take 10-20 minutes. Is that something you’re interested in me working up? If I did that, it would be pretty simple for someone to get it working on PieFed, just fill in .env and run the script. Then you’d have to fire up the interpreter, unpickle user_ranks.pkl and start poking around in there, but I could give you some guidance.

That’s where I would start with it. Getting it to speak to the PieFed API to enact its judgements would be a separate thing, but checking it out and seeing what it thinks of your users and how easy it is to work with, as a first step, is very easy.

I had this vague vision of augmenting Lemmy so that it has a user-configurable jerk filter, which can be switched to filter out the avowed jerks from your view of the Lemmyverse regardless of whether the moderators are getting the job done. I think putting the control in the hands of the users instead of the mods and admins would be a nice thing. If you want to talk about that for PieFed, that sounds grand to me.