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RE: The Flag, The Down Vote... my semi-frequent update to this idea... hopefully those in favor of the downvote read it

in #flag8 years ago

Cheetah was programmed by @anyx I believe. Writing a bot can be tricky. It's not a person so it is a balancing act. I haven't really noticed Cheetah being used intentionally bad, though I have seen it make mistakes. @anyx also seems like a pretty decent person.

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he may be, but i have seen time and again what i described. sometimes it appears to be someone who does not speak english well and may not understand why they are being flagged into oblivion by a dozen bots or more. i think this discourages people from using the platform. there is no telling how many countless hours people have had to spend dealing with the results of this bot spawned abuse. i have created, for myself a practice i call flag mining. i spend at least an hour a week finding flagged posts and seeing what's in them. normally if i see something flagged, i just move on. sometimes, paying deliberate attention to only flagged posts has yielded some interesting results. i can see patterns in what gets flagged out of opinion. i also get to see which whales chronically misbehave. sometimes i just find cool posts.

I agree. Yet I am also a programmer. I know writing a perfect bot is next to impossible. I also did get a chance to see what it was like here before Cheetah. It is WAY WAY better. We had accounts posting new posts every 5 minutes and you could tell they were just bots scraping news sites and snagging an image... there were so many of them it was hard to find the real posts.

sounds annoying, and no way would i want the job of writing bots for fighting the crap. i hope the other problems get worked out though. thanks for keeping the debate alive.

Yeah it truly is a tough problem. Right now I am more trying to change MINDS of people, as I don't see an easy way to solve this problem yet programmatically.