fantastic

it’s fine throw it in a smoothie

Michelob Ultra

they’re…

they’re not?

Tech ingredients

You think Meema’s recipe is good?

You should try Pawpaw’s:

So anyways they got married and had like… ten thousand babies

Just polishing my shoe…

nomnom

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

Yeah I think its got to work for people to buy into it. And frankly my earliest implementations were “inconsistent” at best.

My thought right now is that the tool needs to do a first pass to encode the “meta-structure”, or perhaps… scaffolding(?) of a conversation… then proceed to encode the impressions/ leanings. I have tools that can do this in-part, but it needs to be… “bigger”… whatever that means. So there is sentiment analysis, easy enough. There is key phrase extraction. And thats fine for a single comment… but how do we encode the dynamic of a conversation? Well thats quite a bit more tricky.

Mods have a form of power that users/ participants in communities dont.

That’s it. That’s the thing in its entirety.

so can u tell me more about this project wen u have time?

Certainly! I can also give you code you can work and play around with yourself. I’m more than happy to send you some boiler plate you can play around with yourself.

but are you using it to attack users or to find out bad mod actions and proof of mods and admins and people like @PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au who obsess and witchhunt people they disagree with?

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.

Fundamentally, I’m interested in these things from an academic perspective. How do conversations (debate) online work? What governs them? There are obviously rules (you can read them on the side bar), but there are also “rules” that aren’t written on the side bar. What are the unwritten rules?

What does it take to “change” someones mind? Or, more broadly, what does it take to change a communities mind? How do power dynamics play into that? For example, you’ve probably read my thread with @PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au at this point about the power mods have to steer the direction of a community.

Part of the reason I’m interested in this is because its part of my lived experience. I watch how myself and others were, frankly, absolutely brigaided against, for months, years on end, for holding critical but important positions on the Democratic party. It was very, very bad. We had opinions that were not very popular at the time and suffered as a result. But things changed, and time has shown we were right in our criticism. So what dynamics were at play that resulted in those perspectives being at first oppressed/ suppressed, to then become the dominant narratives? How does that work? What is its function?

Beyond that, I’m a quantitative person. I want a number at the end of the day; as shocking as it might be with all my discussion of narrative, at the end of the day I want a number, something solid I can stand on. So doing this kind of work in my own way, I want to find a way to quantify these things. Its not enough for me to simply look at an encode the stories; I want to put a number on it. That means building things up to be reproducible and automated to support large, if not census, level samples.

Finally, I really like doing network analysis. Its something I do professionally, but its just something I think is neat. Taking all of those previous questions and putting them into the context of a social network, thats something that sounds really challenging and fun to me.

And in regard to your other question:

this sounds gross and very much like witch-hunting and stalking. yes, all comments are public but u coming up w a tool just to find someones and analyze and make judgement on them seems gross and out of line. think of how fasicst and controling that sounds. what if some republican was doing that and bragged about it? think about that

I mean, you do realize that anyone, quite literally anyone, could form a 1 person instance and vacuum up all comment, post, etc… data from every other instance? I don’t have issue with it, in the same manner that I don’t have issue someone going through all 9k of my comments and reading them. If I didn’t want them to be made public, I wouldn’t make those comments. There are things I don’t say because I don’t want that information to be made public. Fundamentally these things are about power dynamics. For something to be fascistic or controlling I would have to have power over someone or something. I don’t. I have no secret access to any secret information, I have no power over any one or any thing. I’m simply working with and observing what is present.

This is a somewhat famous thread here that I recommend you read all of the comments of. Its the one @PhillipTheBucket@quokk.au and I are discussing. It also highlights the dynamic I’m interested in illustrating. Here is the link: https://lemmy.world/post/16224102?sort=Top

I recommend sorting by “Top” and reading through the first couple comment threads from top to bottom. Then scroll to the very bottom and read the comment threads in reverse order, basically most down voted. This should give you an idea for the type of dynamic I’m identifying, and the research I’m interested in conducting is how this dynamic shifted within our community. These days you would see an inversion of which narratives are being upvoted and which ones are being down-voted. So how did that come to be?

Lol. We get to the rub of the matter and you want to take your ball and go home.

laugh out loud out loud

He must be looking for an opinion to have.

Okay, but you can at least agree that mods have a form of power that user/participants dont?

They aren’t a mod. They don’t have power in the relationship. Just straight up.

Mods have a degree of power and control in the relationship that Ozma doesn’t have; and you are giving me an excellent example of how they can use that power to structure and control a narrative.

Mods have a power that a user/ participant will never have.

And the example you are providing is a perfect example of what I want to highlight. The mods used their power to create the impression of a specific narrative, and you bought it. Other voices, objecting to this, were actively being suppressed in this very thread. But the mods have the power in the relationship, so you see at the top the comments you are highlighting: this is exactly the kind of abuse of power I intend to highlight. And your perceptions of what you think was happening is the exact effect I’m interesting in documenting.

And the key here, is that, in-spite of their power, reality has a way of coming around. Ozma was “right” in the sense that when history was finally written, they’re on the right side of it, and Jordan is on the wrong side. Jordan won the narrative battle, but lost the narrative war. Jordan’s ability to control and manage that narrative is perfectly on display in those top comments, but now, the narrative has shifted towards the narrative that Ozma was trying to construct and deliver.

More broadly, everyone is always trying to construct these kinds of narratives. You are trying to construct a narrative. I’m trying to construct a narrative. Ozma is trying to construct a narrative. Jordan is trying to construct a narrative. But only has Jordan has the ability to drop a ban hammer. That’s the critical difference. Thats the power dynamic that is present.

Edit, to put a finer point on it.

Say in this thread the community is 90:10 in agreement with the ban. Lets say today that people would be 40:60 in favor of a ban. That’s would be a 50 point swing in Ozma’s favor.

900 km/h standing still