Proof of AI-assisted political profiling by Unruffled @ lemmy.dbzer0.com
13h 46m ago by piefed.social/u/rimu in fediverse from s.faf-pb.xyz
from the mod log:
https://s.faf-pb.xyz/lXxek
The output from the LLM was provided as proof that someone needed to be banned.
I didn't want to do this but my hand was forced by their dissembling, minimization and bullshit. Note how the output includes a nice big logo with a slogan and ascii graphics - this was not a one-off experiment, this is an app they were proud to call their own.
Rimu, this is your third time in a week starting shit with db0 admins. None of what you've done recently has inspired any confidence from me in you or your projects. Given the side you picked during the recent lemmy.world drama, your posts come across more like hitpieces than well thought out complaints.
Also, wtf is up with you calling the entire idea of decentralization into question? Internet services require resources to run, and the barrier to entry for hosting an instance is relatively low. It's absurd to call instances feudal fiefdoms when anybody with a bit of time and disposable income can theoretically set one up. What is the alternative, all those "fiefdoms" needing to report to a monarch who will only use their power to protect marginalized groups from bigotry(trust me bro)?
What makes it especially egregious is that you aren't simply a user or even an instance admin, but the head developer of an entire section of the fediverse. You are not a neutral party arguing ideals, you are a person who could theoretically try to crown yourself king. You focusing so much of your efforts on attacking instances that you have ideological problems with is worrying.
I wouldn't trust an admin like that to protect me from bigotry on their server, nor would I want them to dictate moderation for instances on their platform. Since you seem so keen on highlighting how your instance bans fewer people than others, how could I trust you to not mandate tolerance of a "diversity of opinions" like another notable instance that gives fewer bans?
Also, wtf is up with you calling the entire idea of decentralization into question?
What a terrible day to have eyes. Is this political naïveté or bumbling Machiavellianism?
I think OP may be on a path to ragequitting.
My personal opinion is that Rimu doesn't think b he's trying to become king of the fediverse. I think he sees himself as a progressive fighting back against ideas, people, and movements that threaten his idea of progress. He likes that blog post so much because it positions the free and voluntary association inherent to federation as a right wing idea, something that needs order imposed upon it by a liberal democratic institution ("like the UN"). If it's right wing to be decentralized, him trying to create a centralized authority is left wing.
I'm of the opinion that people usually believe what they say, and Rimu is no different. Why else would he share such an embarrassing article thinking it makes some convincing point? His thinking is liberal to the core, and he does not understand paradigms without centralized authority regulating behavior. It's no wonder he doesn't like the anarchist instances.
At the same time, belief that you aren't power grabbing does not prevent someone from power grabbing. I don't think Rimu will give up in the long run. Even if this episode is a loss that does more to lose allies than gain them, he is still gonna keep doing what he has been doing. He can't use piefed to mandate his philosophy on moderation without alienating more people. He'll never get his idea of a fediverse UN off the ground, both with how he's acted and because many instances would never agree to something like it. If he properly reads the room, he'll be quiet and wait for some better opportunity for mass defederation to show up. Either that or he'll thrash around and create even more problems for himself.
I would concur with this assessment.
I've not had many run ins with Rimu myself but the ones that I have had have been... tense. For example, he said that he believes that Lemmy devs should have added guardrails to Lemmy in order to stop it being, as he described, "overrun with memes". So he hardbaked in something that marked meme communities as "low effort". He doesn't like reaction gifs so he hardbaked in something that gave negative reputation to people using reaction gifs. Oh yeah, and he made up the whole reputation garbage all over again so certain users could be more valuable than others.
Yeah. It really does feel like he is trying to be the king of the fediverse and slip his opinions in wherever he can. Then when someone notices it, he fights against it before eventually adding on a toggle.
Edit: Only made more clear by the fact that my comments critical of him are not visible on piefed.social.
@rimu@piefed.social is this the cause of your issue yesterday? We talked about this for hours. Just defederate.
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com is an admin, he owns the server, he can do what he likes on that server.
As I said yesterday, and overwhelmingly everyone chimed in agreeing: This is the nature of the fediverse. You do not get to make rules for the entire fediverse.
You are on piefed.social, just block his server from your feed you dislike it so much.
I didn't catch the previous post and gave it a quick skim now. My thoughts are more to do with how LLM based moderation is viewed by users.
It's not a new thing, since sentiment analysis based moderation has been around for a long while. Where it becomes a problem is
- The sentiment analysis makes mistakes and it gets tedious to deal with platforms that use it for automated moderation. This is a big problem with old social media platforms like Reddit, or comment sections in places like Instagram/Facebook.
- It can be used as a flimsy excuse to take moderation actions when such actions aren't necessary, which makes users trust that moderation team less
I also don't agree with the privacy angle since all content here is public by nature, but I do see value in discussing these other problems since that's what this community is for?
Also, while Rimu can defederate, letting people discuss it first is better. Best case scenario, the groups find some kind of compromise. Otherwise it lets people weigh in on the platform policies and federation status, instead of having admins make that call on their own
The thing is, nothing is automated. From what I can see it only flags potential posts for a mod/admin to verify and act on.
It's not like this is a bot that scans everyone's posts and automatically bans them, it's an entirely manual process to download a comment history and AI ctrl-f for stuff.
There has been some deceptive information spread around what this tool seems to actually do. Which is especially concerning after the recent (proven) misinformation about Nazis infiltrating our instances.
This is a good take, and I appreciate it.
The cold hard fact is that there are a lot of bad actors, even here on Lemmy. Most users are sheltered from it because of good mods and admins. It's easy to shit on them, but these people sort through the absolute muck. There's a reason we don't have racists and gore and CP here, and it's because they keep all of it at bay away from eyes here. I know this because I firsthand have seen some of the permanently scarring shit, and it was only a small fraction of what mods on world deal with.
Soi don't blame moderated arching out tools that help them not see it.
However each admin and mod have to decide for themselves and their users what is best for them, and that is purely an admin level decision for their server. The fediverse is very cool that everyone can make their own rules, and I like that nuance.
Note that just because I'm an admin, I don't do what I like. We explicitly reject the BDFL approach. Also you're missing the objective of rimu here; it's not to stop our admins from doing a specific thing, it's to agitate other instances to defederate us widely.
Of course, apologies if my comment came off as you independently are doing something crazy that we should all defederate. You absolutely are not in my book doing something outlandish.
My point only was that I don't know why someone on piefed.social feels the need to post in lemmy.world about something that is what appears to me to be an internal instance choice.
Db0 to you directly, and for everyone reading, you have done more for the fediverse than the vast majority here and are up with the developers in my book. You have built tools for the fediverse that most will never see that keep onslaughts of abuse from hitting our servers. Personally, you have helped me with my own server helping me debug now almost three years ago. It will take much more than rimu's personal issues with you to burn through the goodwill you've built up with me, and I assume the other admins.
Personally, while I am not a mod or an admin of this channel, I would argue that a personal vendetta is not relevant to the fediverse channel amd I hope these posts are both removed. I agree that they are thinly veiled attempts at trying to manipulate admins.
I appreciate your kind words
👏
hear hear
Defederating doesn't solve the problem. Awareness might.
And what exactly is “the problem”? Because I don’t see one.
Is it the anti-Zionism?
Is it the mod automation?
Is it the use of AI in the mod automation?
There is no and was no mod automation
Awesome—yet more lies & innuendo. WTF is with this high school-ass drama?
I too am too old for this shit.
—
Proof Lemmy.ML is use AI. The ML stands for Machine-Learning.
Open-and-shut-case in my book.
It gets even deeper. Lemmy. switch some letters around, remove the E and Y.
llm.
my god. none of us are real. we're all ai.
Rimu really upset people view memes?
Which is the funniest revelation to come out of this whole drama tbh is @rimu@piefed.social's personal crusade against memes on the fediverse
Another hit piece from rimu against /0. Must be a day that ends with -y...
EDIT: Here's rimu admitting that this is all based on a single modlog and him just making assumptions based on that and that alone.
Here's the series of events as I understand it
- Rimu sees a two-week-old public modlog entry from unruffled banning a zionist as per our instance rules.
- Rimu visits the public evidence linked and discovers that it's a dump of the comments of said zionist, and it includes an LLM summary of those
- Rimu sees the FAF logo on the pastebin. Rimu assumes that even though it's clearly not a FAF domain, since it has the FAF logo, it's an official FAF tool. This is false.
- Rimu sees the LLM summmary and assumes that the banning happened due to the LLM summary. This is false
- Rimu assumes that the tool that gathered these comments is automated. This is false
- Rimu assumes that because it looks like an official tool, and despite the fact that he can only find a single modlog entry, all of the instance admins are regularly using it. This is false.
- Rimu concludes that the instance is using an automated LLM judgement mechanism for instance moderation. This is egregiously false
- Rimu does not reach out to any of our instance admins for clarification, even though we exist in the same instance-cooperation matrix channels. Even though our instance admins explicitly reached out to him earlier this month and asked to contact them for any questions/cooperation in order to avoid further drama and escalations. Note that there's a reason why journalists ask for comments before publishing information.
- Rimu doesn't do any other due diligence.
- Rimu rushes to publish with a cross-post to mastodon, because he knows the knee-jerk GenAI-hate there is much stronger than on threadiverse.
- When called on any of the false and misleading statements he's made by multiple people in the comments, Rimu completely ignores everyone countering him and all arguments, not to mention being so confused he doesn't even know if he's talking about mods or admins.
I'll leave the fact of why Rimu was randomly going through 2-week old modlogs of banned zionists as an interesting open-ended question.
Rimu continuing to crash out will potentially kill PieFed, which makes sense given their rabid anti-leftism.
Why are you surprised? Dbzero is pro AI. Nobody own the fediverse, instsnces has the tight to use whatever tools they want
And with that comes the consequence of all other instances to federate thus resulting in the offending becoming an echo chamber to avoid
Is this a Lemmy popcorn moment ?
Absolutely it is. Grab a bucket and relax
I have no idea what your mental model of the world is such that this is in any way an issue, because in mine there is literally nothing here.
I have grown so weary of your flagrant lies, Rimu.
This is nonsense. Stop posting lies based off of your own misunderstandings. Stop using this community as your own personal drama cope.
Edit: Lol this comment, and none of my recent ones criticizing Rimu, are visible on piefed.social. Hmm. I wonder why. You really going to complain about people running things as a fiefdom and then act the way that you are?
Rimu making up and falling for conspiracy theories to justify hating leftists? Must be a day that ends in -y.
Piefed defederating from that group of "anarchistic" instances would get me to change to piefed if .world didn't immediately follow suit.
It's not even so much that the users on those instances are all bad, they're not.
It's that their admin team (it's really one group across multiple instances) are either incapable or unwilling to keep out bad faith users.
It legitimately doesn't matter which it is, and bad faith users would love if that's the discussion.
When rot spreads in a connected network like this, you prune it before it can spread. Admins got rid of hexbear, and thought that was enough. Since it wasn't, it continued to spread and now even more drastic action needs taken.
I don't want to keep relitigating this shit, but these decisions can't drag out, the longer this goes on the more rewarding it is for those same users to infiltrate another instance and try the same shit.
All the problematic users have alts all over, but defederating from the main instances drastically cuts off their recruitment. They'd be forced to deal with competent local admins, and every post/comment wouldn't include an advertisement for their home instance allows that type of shit.
Edit:
Or an option for an account to choose to defederate their account from instances on a case by case bias.
A setting page with every instance federated at large, and if you uncheck a box none of your comments/posts/votes are even sent to that service.
That is what a "block" should be. Right now it's just "ignore" which is plugging your eyes just to their community posts.
That also gives admins a reliable pulse check. If 60% of users took the time to individually defend from an instance, they should evaluate if they should be federated at all, or at least ask their users why it's happening.
Then leave, nazi.
You would be a great asset to any instance luck enough to house you!
Anyone can put anything in a mod log...
That first entry, I've never commented in, only like 10 ever have.
https://lemmy.world/modlog/1471856
That "mod" just puts huge notes in there for their empty community, hoping naive users think that and agrees with them. Hell, mine flat out says the reason is I banned that user for something else, he got big mad, and banned me from somewhere I'd never ever go.
Then a chunk of Pig Jesus subs...
And a BanPitbulls subs, which is almost always an entry into racism...
Like,you need to use critical thinking bro, not just here but like, everywhere.
And all those mods over all those communities just randomly had it out for you!
all those mods
Literally half of them are pugjesus...
And for clarity, it's because I downvoted their spam posts about leaving .world but that they were keeping all their .world communities so no one could use them...
I 100% stand by those, I don't know why admins haven't just deleted those communities so the can be recreated and used
People should block zionazis tolerant communities like yours
They moderate a mental health meme comm, a community for fan theories with five posts all from more than a year ago, and a community that documents the collapse of society under capitalism... what about those demonstrate a high amount of tolerance for zionists?
https://lemmy.zip/post/63250269
Read the srcond paragraph. This is the type of disgusting comments they allows and permaban you for reporting too much of those
New schitzo post by Rimu dropped
3rd in a week, wonder when world uses any of them to defed from db0
Meh. As I always say I just want the ability to block instances as and either or for communities and users. if dbzer0 bans me I want to be able to block the communites (mods/admins to me) without blocking the relatively innocent (possibly) users. although wow. looking at it that is pretty creepy in a way. Its kinda funny as it might be one of the bigger issues (israels treatment of palestine) around if it were not for the state of my own country.
Really not a fan of repeatedly seeing these oddly specific posts jumping to conclusions and "just asking questions." It feels like an incredibly aggressive disinformation campaign from one of those "rationality" yotubers. Like the conclusion has already been decided and you went out to find data to support it.