auk

My understanding is that downvotes reflect whether or not someone agrees with a post or comment much more than whether the user is making a constructive comment or not so they can only be used to infer how agreeable the comment is.

I never responded to this part, and I should have. Yes, people definitely vote in exactly that fashion. They do, however, upvote about 10 times more than they downvote. And, the bot takes into account everything you say. It's not just those controversial topics. You have to be talking about only, or majority, things that people don't want to hear in order to trigger it. And, Lemmy is all those minority political takes on things. There are a lot of communities where you'll get straight-up banned for saying things that are mainstream American points of view. The people who tend to be argumentative like to maintain a fiction that people on Lemmy just can't handle someone who's anti-genocide, or something like that, when they're showing up right next to a "fuck Israel" meme or a "fuck Biden for arming Israel" meme that has 1,500 upvotes.

It's hard for me to make a convincing argument that it's tolerant of dissenting voices who aren't jerks about it without listing off accounts. I can do some version, though, if you're interested, listing examples of banned and not-banned accounts to illustrate where the boundary line is.

You can give me a sentiment analysis, if you want to, you have my profile.

Your 1-star review is noted. When I open a Yelp page for the bot, I'll be sure to let you know, and you can speak to my manager about it.

Tell you what. I can respond to this in two different ways. I really don't agree with silencing people who have a different point of view than I do. On other platforms, I've spent a ton of time arguing with conservatives. So much time. It's not unfamiliar to me. I don't think people need to limit their interactions to only the people who are "right," if that makes sense. It's okay for someone to be saying something that I think is wrong, as long as they're open to a conversation about it. I can say where I think some of your sources have a long history of deliberately misleading people, as a way of making the case that they are misleading you, too. I don't view you as the enemy, necessarily, but I do think you're mistaken.

If I'm going to have that conversation with me, then you don't have to agree with me or be nice to me, but I do need you to be willing to hear me out. In exchange, I'll promise to hear you out, too, and take seriously what you're saying, enough to disagree with it honestly and respectfully when I disagree with it. Is that something you're interested in? Because we have about as different a set of viewpoints as you could imagine, but I'm still fine talking with you, and having a real exchange of views.

If you don't want to do that, and just want to emit your viewpoint and belittle other viewpoints until people remove you from the community, then I can respond to you accordingly. But I would prefer to do the first thing. I don't think this is the forum for it, but we can surely find one, and I can spend a while talking with you about the viewpoints you seem to think are getting you censored.

Edit: Grammar

You got banned for hot takes like, "A lot more pedophiles endorsing Harris though. It would cancel out if they were about the same, but they aren't."

I'm curious to know what you said under the posts about the Harris campaign HQ getting shot with bullets, or the disinformation project which produced the video of illegal immigrants saying they're registered to vote, but not curious enough to look into it any further.

Sounds like the bot knows its job. The paradox of tolerance is tempting, but it's resisting.

Sure. Here's you. Red is downvotes, blue is upvotes. The left-right axis is time, with the past on the left.

The bar right below the red/blue bar code is the key to what comments were in what posts.

One thing that jumps out at me is that almost all of your participation is in political threads, and the majority of it is getting downvoted. It would be different if you were just participating in Lemmy, and then also you had some views that were unpopular. That happens to a lot of people, and I've bent over backwards trying to preserve their right to do that when I've been making and tuning the bot. This isn't that. This is almost all just you going in and arguing with people.

One thing I say a lot when talking to people about this is, "It's not your opinion, it's your delivery." I'm going to be honest, when I read your first message here, it annoyed me. You're coming out of the gate hostile. Most people, when they receive that, are going to be hostile back. It's just how people work. You're not going to convince them of your point of view, you're not going to be able to fine-tune your own point of view to let them poke holes in any mistakes in it. You're just going to irritate everyone. That's a choice you're making in how you approach things, and I think it's completely fair for people to react to that choice by closing the door on you.

It's the difference between going to a party when you're in a fringe political party, and having conversations about it, versus showing up to the party with a bunch of flyers and handing one to every person and making almost every conversation over the course of the night revolve around your chosen fringe political party. The first one is fine, or should be, at a decent party. The second one, people are going to remove you from the party for. I think if you want to make an impact on people's thinking, you're going to need to recognize and respect that reality of human nature.

Having an unpopular political opinion is fine. Being a little bit combative with people is fine. Doing both at once is going to collect a tidal wave of downvotes, and also I think is going to make it harder for you to make any progress convincing anyone of anything.

I regularly get dozens of downvotes for such hot takes as “facilitating genocide hurts the dems chances of getting elected, we need them to stop that if we want them to win.”.

I'm going to stop you right there.

You're playing a little game where you claim you said one thing and got downvoted for it, when I can guarantee you actually said something different. You probably said that we need to not vote for the Democrats, because they're facilitating genocide. That's different. You can say that, sure. Someone might say back to you that not voting for the Democrats is going to make the genocide 20 times worse, and that's why they're voting for the Democrats. They can say that, too. That's progress, that's people talking to each other. Maybe one or the other of you will learn something from the exchange.

Where it gets difficult is where you go off into this alternate reality where they said, "I love genocide, and I love the Democrats, I'm going to give you downvotes because you don't support genocide which I love," and then you start arguing against that thing that they didn't say. That's not progress. That's just people shouting and trying to twist the conversation around so that they can "win." It only takes a little bit of that before people are going to stop talking to you.

I know you do that, because you did it to me in your first message in this conversation.

I looked over some of your posting history, and I think you've got some valuable things to say. I learned some things about how bad Liz Cheney was before she for some reason found her principles and broke with the Republican party over Trump. I saw some debates people were having with you about Russian and Chinese history, where I don't think you're right, but it didn't seem like any kind of badly intentioned thing.

I think if you built up the habit of always responding honestly to what people said, and telling the truth about your own views and the world outside the best way you can, the bot wouldn't treat you harshly, and you'd also make more progress in convincing people of what you're trying to say.

Try again: What's the last thing you said that got dozens of downvotes, and what did you actually say that got dozens of downvotes? What was the opposing side's core argument, honestly summarized?

So it would delete people’s posts if they get downvoted a lot

No.

or if the poster tends to upvote heavily downvoted posts?

No.

You’ve automated the suppression of dissenting voices.

Am not.

It's a perfectly fair concern. I'm trying to be careful to make sure I'm not doing that. There's quite a lot of explanation in the FAQ, and some conversations you can look back over with people who were concerned, because they've had experience with exactly that happening to them.

At one point I tried to illustrate with data just how big a jerk you have to be before it starts banning you. If you're interested, I can start doing that again. Being a dissenting voice on its own is nowhere near enough to anger the bot. You can look over [email protected] and see quite a few dissenting voices. I've also offered to delve, for any user who feels that this has happened to them, into the breakdown of why they're being ranked down, which almost always is because they're being a jerk about their "dissenting" opinion, and not the opinion itself.

Also, I think it's hilarious that someone coming from lemmy.ml is accusing me of trying to suppress dissenting voices. Lemmy.ml has been suppressing dissenting voices since its inception. The degree to which I'm bending over backwards not to suppress dissenting voices is something I think you should absorb and carry over to the lemmy.ml moderators as a good replacement for their current banhammer circus.

It's very deliberate.

One of the key features of an abusive relationship is shutting you down from people who can help you.

If someone's in the middle of a disaster, and Joe Biden's federal government comes and helps them out, it's a catastrophe for the Republicans. It brings the psychotic lies people have been told about the government into contact with the reality of the federal government in the real world, which is one of the few ways they might be able to break out of their elaborate propaganda-bubbles.

If, on the other hand, they're convinced that FEMA is now coming to kill them, but also their home has been washed away in a mudslide, then they might wind up fleeing the state, living with their family on their brother-in-law's couches, trying to scrape by, becoming more and more desperate, with no one to give them any substantive assistance of any kind. The desperation increases. The fear of anything governmental or democratic can continue, and increase.

And then, when their brother-in-law offers them a rifle and an invitation to come with a few people and shoot up the election office, or the Democratic organizer's home, because the government already tried to kill them once when they were at their lowest point, and they escaped only by the skin of their teeth, so it might as well be go time... well, they might accept the offer. Because why not?

By demonizing FEMA, the Republicans are turning what would have been a problem into a recruitment tool.

If they manage to hit 5% of the vote this election, which of course would mean a Trump win, then they will in no way, shape, or form have guaranteed ballot access in the next election. They'll be lucky if they aren't in prison or worse.

This person who's going around calling herself a socialist, and also risking Trump getting elected, is showing an incredible level of thick-headed cluelessness as to what he plans to have the police and military do to anything that looks any type of left-wing, over the course of his second term.

They also won't hit 5%, but that's not even the main concern here.

If you didn't vote in the midterm, you still can claim it. They just don't give you as much.

Yes, yes. That wasn't the question, though.

Where did you find this story? Do you usually read Fox News, and this headline jumped out at you and you had to spread the word? Did someone email it to you? Do you have a Google News alert set up, to send you stories involving Kamala Harris, so you can post them if they're bad, and further your mission of anticolonialism? Did you see it on Facebook when one of your Republican relatives posted it? How did you happen to come across this Fox News story?

We're doing Fox News, now? Huh.

Anticolonialist, how'd you run across this story? Just reading up on Fox News like all the anticolonialists like to do, and you decided to share this story when you ran across it? Or some other way?