this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
263 points (97.1% liked)
Fediverse
41225 readers
728 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments

Don't be too excited. That's been done on here at Lemmy too. I think it was called santabot (on slrpnk instance I think), and it would ban/unban you from some guys community purely based on your upvote/downvote ratio even if you had never heard of his community, without any other input. The mod log was filled with "xxxx banned. xxxx unbanned. xxx banned, etc."
It was controversial, and some called him out on it, but others thought he was doing awesome with it. He mentioned that he was almost done working out the kinks in it and would be offering it to other mods to use.
He's no longer around now, but I was surprised the admins let him keep using that bot the entire time he was here.
Well, there is a difference between having a situation, where some comunities do use automation tools to ban/unban and where the whole platform uses them.
Sure, but this was a little more than an automod, because it was based on what you did outside of the community, and banned you based on how many downvotes you got from other people.
So let's say you got 1 upvote for your comment yesterday. Then 2 downvotes today. That unrelated comm, would ban you even if you had never been there,. had never posted in the comm, or even heard of the comm.
Well, then this automation tool was a piece of crap software poorly designed to mimic Reddit's karma system.
Agreed. And like I mentioned earlier, I was a little troubled by how many were ok with it. Luckily I didn't see it used anywhere else, and haven't seen it since the guy left.