/r/StarTrek founder and primary steward from 2008-2021

Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website

  • 8 Posts
  • 270 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it’s context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.

    There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don’t need to know “how to identify a bot”, they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".




  • The moderator to user ratio on the fediverse is orders of magnitude higher than commercial platforms. Even Lemmy.world (a large, loosely moderated Lemmy instance) has again, orders of magnitude more eyes on its content than reddit.

    This means that even if a chatbot gets invented that is impossible to distinguish form a human, mods will more readily be able to tell if it is pushing a narrative/shilling products.














  • A “reply guy” (wikipedia) is someone who responds to posts/comments in an annoying (usually smug/condescending) way, like what you think of when you think of a “redditor”. Big platforms like Reddit like reply-guys because they generate engagement (often someone telling the reply-guy to f-off) it’s also not a behavior that an algorithm can recognize, so human mods/admins are needed to curb it.

    Over time, if Reply-guys are not banned they tend to make the overall ecosystem too exhausting to participate in, and (authentic, desireable) engagement declines.