Is there a cap to how much stomp a user can have through their votes? By accumulating enough zeitgeist points, can a single user ban a new user from !pleasantpolitics with downvotes?
I gotta say, you're really good at making visualizations. I like this one best, but even the ones I liked less were extremely informative and readable.
Yes, this is very informative.
It's an instructive visualization, but I like it less. The spectral timeline shows how big the changes are and places them in chronologically, and you can see from a distance how contentious the month was. The line graph tells a story about being rewarded or punished for being agreeable or contradictory to the zeitgeist. It reads like the timeline for an American FICO progress graph or a Chinese social credit score, things I have a visceral reaction to. It's a dopamine hit to have a comment collect upvotes, but I'm more proud of positions that I'm confident will age well with time and were presented well, but were downvoted anyway. It is evidence that I'm not in an echo chamber, and I'm not being ignored. If I could pick which graph I got delivered to my stocking, I'd pick the spectral timeline.
The line graph is clearly better suited for discussing how the system functions though. For example, it appears a new member won't get banned for a few negative interactions early in their career, as the cutoff is below zero. The second banned user it appears, if they wait 15 days, will have a positive Santabot assessment regardless of how far down the valley they've gone during the start of the month. You chose the right level of detail to maintain their anonymity.
I love this -- Reddit used to do a yearly thing where they'd send you your top upvoted and downvoted posts and comments that was always nostalgic and fascinating to me as a user. Like canvas, I think it's an idea worth copying with a more federated framework.
Maybe you could write an action that allows Fediverse members to get a similar breakdown and visualization automatically generated and then delivered to them via direct message. People who are curious about how the bot works can message the bot and see how it views them, and then they can share the details publicly if they so choose. I think this could be really popular.
These structural factors that dominate media operations are not alI-controlling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results... The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.
--Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, "Manufacturing Consent"
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