No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
I don't think that the type of power that a janny has is able to meaningfully corrupt the janny. At least, not in most cases; because it's practically no power, like it or not your online community means nothing in the big picture.
Instead, I think that bad moderators are the result of people with specific moral flaws (entitlement, assumptiveness, irrationality, lack of self-control, context illiteracy) simply showing them as they interact with other people. They'd do it without the janny position, it's just that being a janny increases the harm that those trashy users cause.
Why the alternatives that you mentioned to human moderation do not work:
so, like. bots are programed by people. all they really do is put a buffer between the actions of a moderator and the (real) moderators.
The origin (being programmed by people) doesn't matter, what matters are the capabilities. Not even current state-of-art LLMs understand human language on a discursive level, and yet that is necessary if you want to moderate the content produced by human beings.
(inb4: a few people don't understand it either. Those should not be moderators.)
Using them as a buffer would be fine, but sometimes bots are used to replace the actions of human moderators - this is a shitty practice bound to create a lot of false positives (legit content and users being removed) and false negatives (shitty users and content are left alone). Reddit is a good example of that - there's always some fuckhead mod to code automod to remove posts based on individual keywords, and never check the mod logs for false positives.
even if that hypothetical AI could understand human language- and you're right- it's coded by people, and it's actions will be predicated on what those people coded it to do.
Meaning that the AI gets it's sense of appropriate from those people. Which means, those people might as well be modding it. or seen as the mods. bots are all-too-frequently used to insulate the people making the decisions as to what should be moderated from those actions. in the case of reddit automod bot yeeting content based on included words... most of that is stupid, I agree, but then it's those mod's community.
Now I got your point. You're right - the AI in question will inherit the biases and the worldviews of the people coding it, effectively acting as their proxy. IMO for this reason the bot's actions should be seen as moral responsibility of those people (i.e. instead of "the bot did it", it's more like "I did it through the bot").
Even if we see the comm as belonging to the mod, it's still a shitty approach that IMO should be avoided, for the sake of the health of the community. You don't want people breaking the rules by avoiding the automod (it's too easy to do it), but you also don't want content being needlessly removed.
Plus, personally, I don't see a community as "the mod's". It's more like "the users' ". The mods are there enforcing the rules, sure, but the community belongs as much to them as it belongs to the others, you know?
Nicely rendered. You have given me food for thought.