He’s just trolling, he needs to sustain attention which translates to income, now that it’s waning and he looks like a loser. What else is he supposed to do – get an HVAC license? Work at an Apple store? His options are limited.

Well, not really any of the above. I’ve tried with some mild success to build a “troll detection” system, but it needs far more work. Also, in the months since my initial work on this matter, I’ve found some far better approaches and would want to implement them. So my old work isn’t reflective of the new direction I’m planning to take.

I’ve actually done a version of this and a couple of other various ideas about it. The current WIP idea works totally differently to what you are talking about, I actually got as far as making a community for it, but then abandoned the effort because I couldn’t figure out a way to deploy it that would be in any way productive.

I’m going to say it knowing ahead of time that roughly 100% of the people reading are going to think it’s a terrible idea: It is an LLM-based moderator that watches the conversation and can pick out bad faith types on conduct in the conversation. I actually 100% agree with you about political conversation online being almost exclusively a big waste of time (including because of the way moderation happens and people trying to deliberately distort the narrative). This was just my idea to try to help it.

The thing that led me to never do anything with it was that I didn’t feel like anyone would ever buy into it enough to even take part in a conversation where it was deployed (even assuming it worked passably well which is not proven). If you care about these issues also, though, would you like to try the experiment of having the whole conversation we’re having with it observing the conversation and weighing in? I would actually like to, I’d be fine with continuing with the questions you were asking and continuing this whole debate about moderation and its impact on Lemmy, in that context. Let me know.

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.)

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 any one could go find some examples from memory that they experienced.

Could you find some examples from memory that you experienced, for me?

I feel like we keep having the same conversation here.

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?

There is no point in bothering with conjecture regarding the bans. They happened, its documented, any one can look it up.

Can you look them up, and show them to me? I came close to digging through the modlog myself, to prove that the number of times in Dec 2023 / Jan 2024 that someone was banned for posting a poll showing Biden behind was 0.

We argued that without replacing Biden, we’d lose the election.

I said that with replacing Biden, we’d lose the election, because the exact same arguments that applied to Biden would get applied to Harris, plus some new ones, and all the forces that marshaled a variety of bad-faith bullshit against Biden would start to do the same against Harris, and people in this country literally can’t tell up from down when it comes to the election. And, in the election, that’s what happened.

A lot of what you’re saying happened also, yes. I’m genuinely confused about how you’re accusing me of being cynical about it or telling the Democrats to be more right wing. What statements did I make that led you to think that?

My ass. I wish the mods had banned obviously disingenuous “let’s let Trump win to make a point, what’s the difference anyway” made-up critique that blamed Kamala Harris for Gaza and inflation, under a tissue-thin pretense of “I just care about the country sooooooooooooooooooooo much that I’m giving well informed constructive criticism.” Instead we had to just yell at y’all about it in the comments, which since there were hundreds of posts and comments every single day with that viewpoint was always a losing battle. Even trolling of crayon-quality transparency of the UniversalMonk variety was explicitly allowed by the mods, and people who objected to it too strongly got banned for it.

The whining about how you’re not allowed to get your message out, which is constantly broadcasted on every channel where you’re claiming you’re being silenced, is just part and parcel of the alternate reality you’re having a good bit of success in constructing. MAGA does it too, it’s part of the package.