Santabot

27 readers

1 users here now

Santabot is an automated moderation tool, designed to reduce moderation load and remove bad actors in a way that is transparent to all and mostly resistant to abuse and evasion.

This is a community devoted to meta discussion for the bot.

founded 4 months ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Here's why I don't think this is a good idea. (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It would be extraordinarily easy to bot it and just silence anyone you want.
I agree, moderation is absolutely necessary to maintaine civil discussion, but silencing people, because they have unpopular opinions, is a really bad idea.
I love lemmy because it is the ultimate embodiment of decentralised free speech. This destroys that.
If I were a bad actor, hypothetically, let's just say lammy.ml or haxbear and I decided I wanted to silence anyone who disagrees with what I have to say. Then I could just make a fork of this project to only value my instances votes and censor anyone who doesn't agree with what my community thinks.
This tool simply acts as a force multiplier for those who want to use censorship as a tool for mass silencing of descent.

Yes, I've read the Q&A, But I can simply think of more ways to abuse this bot for bad than it can be used for good.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[+] [email protected] -309 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Do instances have rankings or are all users considered equall? i see issues with both cases.

All instances are equal.

Are all upvotes equall?

Not at all. Votes are weighted by the "rank" of the user, as determined by the weight of votes coming in from other users. It's a modified version of PageRank, with the same strengths and a lot of the same vulnerabilities as PageRank.

how does instances with disabled downvotes work?

They're not considered differently in the algorithm. If only upvotes are coming out of any given instance, they're considered to be the same as any other upvote.

what about single direction federation?

What do you mean?

can u give me some number on the effectivness of upvotes per account downvoting on a user.

I'm deliberately not providing too much introspection into how things work numerically, because I don't want to provide a roadmap for how to abuse the system. It's impossible to make this type of system bulletproof. All I'm saying is that I think it's a lot more difficult to abuse it than you think it is.

Open sourcing it sounds like a good idea till u realise anyone can then use it to purposely be malicious so thats an even worse idea its a complex issue that thankfully i dont gotta solve.

Abusive moderation already exists on Lemmy. Automating it based on the community at large, at this point, sounds to me like more of a blessing than anything else. I don't think anyone who wants to enact abusive moderation would bother with this tool. They would just ban the people they don't like and think no more about it.

I do t see how its a privacy violation all the raw votes are public anyways i guess its just ur bots judgements that are private. Ur welcome to post my results publicly since its all open anyways.

I don't mean that it's a privacy violation in the sense of exposing people's votes. What I mean is that I don't want to create a bullying atmosphere, where I'm holding up one person's account and outlining all the reasons they are a bad poster and are banned. I prefer to do that only for people who have signed up to have it done to them.

Im greatfull for you licence to develop a system designed to try abuse ur bot. As long as i dont get defederated it should be doable without resorting to illegal practice’s (buying stolen accounts etc).

No problem. I'm interested in researching the question of how well it works, obviously. I may not be very helpful to you, in terms of giving feedback about how it's working, because as I said, I don't want to provide a roadmap. But if you think you are capable to do this, it helps me understand the system and its strengths and weaknesses to have you make the attempt.

I do think that you should worry about being defederated. I don't plan to make any attempt to influence people to defederate you, but I wouldn't be surprised if some administrators take notice of what you're doing and defederate you on their own. Vote-rigging is one of a handful of behaviors which admins feel strongly enough about to defederate for.

I can print about 1k upvotes per 5minutes with 200accounts each account will have about 1/200th that many votes per 5minutes (rank building). Is this pace significant enough to influence ur algorithm?

I doubt it. You need to outweigh millions of real votes. You can leave your process running and eventually reach that level, but I think that before you start creating an impact on the algorithm, you will be noticed and defederated. I could be wrong, of course, which is why it's a useful experiment.

I think you should also consider the performance implications of your work. If someone starts seeing increased load on their server, and they look into it and discover that you are federating clearly fake votes in the range of thousands per hour and that's why their performance is suffering, they are likely to defederate you and ban your accounts on other instances now and in the future, at the very least. I'm fine with you doing this experiment, but that doesn't extend to server administrators being fine with your impacts on them.

In fact, I recommend that you send a quick note to the server administrator of whichever instance, outlining what you're doing and asking if it is okay from their point of view. I'm not on board for you causing operational problems to anybody.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I spun up my own instance for that very reason as to not be fucking with some poor admin and am only federating with large instances (the ones u post and comment on) to avoid loading any small instances unnessasarilly.

[+] [email protected] -195 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Your karma farm needs to be federated in order to work the way you want it to. It's not enough for your instance to federate with the world, that specific community also needs to.

I think I worked out a way to make it influence the vote bot rankings without polluting a real instance, but you'll need to redo all the votes so they federate out. I think it'll work fine if you just have all the vote bots undo their votes to each other, and then redo them. Give it a try.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ahh so the karma farm isnt federating? This is my first time running anything federated. If somone from ur instance subscribes to the karma farm community will that then federate it to ur instance and thus allow ur bot to count those votes?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Ahh so the karma farm isnt federating?

Yes, that's right. Communities are not federated except to instances that are subscribed to them.

Also, it only counts things going forward. When you subscribe to a community, you don't get the votes going back historically. You only get new votes from that point forward.

If somone from ur instance subscribes to the karma farm community will that then federate it to ur instance and thus allow ur bot to count those votes?

Yes. I've done a version of that now. If you have the bots in the karma farm make all new posts and mutual votes, then I should be able to pick it up now. The posts you made before won't take effect, because nothing was federating out at the time that you made them.