UniversalMonk has been evading the a ban on him by posting from new accounts on ![email protected]. That's ban evasion, which on most instances leads to an account-level ban, as far as I know. The relevant account is [email protected].

I'm not sure how to notify admins on lemm.ee, so I'm posting here. If ban evasion justifies an account ban on lemm.ee, then it's time. If there's a better place to send this note, let me know, and I'll do that instead.

I made a robot moderator. It models trust flow through a network that's made of voting patterns, and detects people and posts/comments that are accumulating a large amount of "negative trust," so to speak.

In its current form, it is supposed to run autonomously. In practice, I have to step in and fix some of its boo-boos when it makes them, which happens sometimes but not very often.

I think it's working well enough at this point that I'd like to experiment with a mode where it can form an assistant to an existing moderation team, instead of taking its own actions. I'm thinking about making it auto-report suspect comments, instead of autonomously deleting them. There are other modes that might be useful, but that might be a good place to start out. Is anyone interested in trying the experiment in one of your communities? I'm pretty confident that at this point it can ease moderation load without causing many problems.

![email protected]

Today's the deadline for AK, AZ, AR, FL, GA, IN, KY, LA, MS, NM, OH, RI, SC, TN, TX.

In addition to the obvious, we are voting for:

State constitutional rights to abortion in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Nevada, and South Dakota.

Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin have initiatives on the ballot to ban noncitizens from voting. It's already illegal, but the initiatives will probably be used to harass and disenfranchise minorities and activists, if they pass.

Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, D.C., Alaska, and Missouri will vote to adopt or prohibit ranked choice voting.

Alaska, California, Massachusetts, and Missouri will vote to adopt a $15-18 minimum wage.

And so on. Ballotpedia has a complete list.

Go register to vote, or check your registration if you've already registered.

The first wave of states, with their deadlines tomorrow, are:

• Alaska
• Arizona
• Arkansas
• Florida
• Georgia
• Indiana
• Kentucky
• Louisiana
• Mississippi
• New Mexico
• Ohio
• Rhode Island
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas

Register here: https://www.vote.org/

Edit: Even if you already registered, check your registration. The bad people have been deleting anyone they can. Even if you're not in a swing state, vote. Find an activist group (check ![email protected]) to join up with, in case something really bad happens. If you can, volunteer to help with the election.

Anything could happen this election.

Vote.

You can call, also: 202-224-3121

CCL is promoting the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, but it looks to me mostly like a giveaway to the fossil fuel lobby.

• It gives a 150-day statute of limitations for legal challenges to energy projects
• It gives a quota for annual oil and gas lease sales through 2029
• It undoes the LNG export pause, and sets a 90-day deadline for approving or denying future export applications, basically preventing future pauses after the fact like the LNG pause

It includes some permitting streamlining for green energy projects, but it's not clear to me how big a deal that was in the first place, and most of its material support seems aimed at the fossil fuel industry.

Did I miss something, or is all the green nature of this bill mostly a Manchin invention?

Every political thread is chock full of people being angry and unreasonable. I did some data mining, and most of the hate is coming from a very small percentage of the community, and the rest of the community is very consistent in downvoting them.

The problem is that even with human moderators enforcing a series of rules, most of those people are still in the comments making things miserable. So I made a bot to do it instead.

![email protected] is a bot that uses an algorithm similar to PageRank to analyze the Lemmy community, and preemptively bans about 1-2% of posters, that consistently get a negative reaction a lot of the time. Take a look at an example of the early results. See how nice that is? It's just people talking, and when they disagree, they say things like "clearly that part is wrong" and "your additions are good information though."

It's too early to tell how well it will work on a larger scale, but I'm hopeful. So, welcome to my experiment. Let's talk politics without all the abusive people coming into the picture too. Please come in and test if this thing can work in the long run.

Pleasant Politics

![email protected]

![email protected] is live! If you missed the previous discussion, it's a community with a robot moderator that bans you if the community doesn't like your comments, even if you're not "breaking the rules." The hope is to have a politics community without the arguing. ![email protected] has an in-depth explanation of how it works.

I was trying to keep the algorithm a secret, to make it more difficult to game the system, but the admins convinced me that basically nobody would participate if they could be banned by a secret system they couldn't know anything about. I posted the code as open source. It works like PageRank, by aggregating votes and assigning trust to users based on who the community trusts and banning users with too low a trust level.

I've also rebalanced the tuning of the algorithm and worked on it more. It now bans a tiny number of users (108 in total right now), but still including a lot of obnoxious accounts. There are now no slrpnk users banned. It's a lot of lemmy.world people, a few from lemmy.ml or lemm.ee, and a scattering from other places.

Check it out! Let me know what you think.