As for equivocation, that should be strongly dialed down too. It annoyed me too, it was "mush", and did not help. I hope you'll find the current version a lot more human.
I'm grateful for the feedback! Changing it based on all these comments has been intense over the past couple of hours, but boy is it now significantly improved and I am super grateful to you and other commenters.
I agree, it shouldn't be like that.
I guess it isn't a surprise that politics will be the hardest topic to moderate.
We'll keep trying to get better. Your comment helps us know where to focus. Thanks.
e: To clarify my point, e.g. you can't calmly disagree with whether or not it's okay to shoot people in streets, that diminishes it as if it was just a slight disagreement
It would be better to gatekeep political communities with precisely worded "principle" questions and then flag for violations of those for anybody who slipped in under the radar.
Even political communities where everyone is nominally on the same page do break down over issues of tone, disingenuous arguments, etc. though.
Personally, I think federal officers have executed law abiding citizens. But if I start out by screaming "The Nazis have control of our government and are executing innocent people in the streets!" then not only have I closed my own mind to potential challenges to my views (which is at best hypocritical to expect the other person to be open-minded when I am not myself open-minded), then we get nowhere and just come away hating each other and thinking the other person is crazy. Worse, it poisons the well so the future reasonable person is immediately written off with guilt-by-association (person A was crazy and person B shares a view with them, therefore they must be crazy too).
That was a question made at one of those public debates that the Oxford University likes to organise, and I think the answer is right on point: the purpose of discourse is to let the audience (or readers) reflect on an opinion, which takes time. It's *almost never* to change the opinion of the person you're debating. It's a given that most people that do like to engage in debate or public discourse are the kind of people that are unlikely to change their minds, and if ever they do, it won't be on the spot.
If one did live under Nazis German rule, would it have been wrong to scream, "The Nazis have control of our government and are executing innocent people in the streets!"? At that point you're trying to wake the public up to do something about it, not sit down and have a debate over Goebbels latest speech with some fence sitter who can't decide whether Hitler has gone too far.
Do all that then I can't see what's hard about it ;oP.
Genuinely though, I think those things are doable. You probably have to have people use their own irl identities (at least the platform needs that information), which is problematic if you want free and open debate.
Interesting on the ESL comment -- gaming it! Great idea!
Version 1: Rights of non-MAGA supporters are being eliminated while implying rights of MAGA supporters are being preserved.
Version 2: Rights of MAGA supporters are being eliminated with a side effect affecting non-MAGA supporters.
The LLMs that power all that are "aligned", that is, they're subjected to manipulation to install specific bias in them, and so on.
However, I did not manage to express any opinion on the transgender rights article, from any political perspective, without being flagged. On one of the comments I tested, it gave me a suggested revision from this:
"This is another move in a pattern of limiting the rights of anyone who isn't a MAGA supporter."
To this:
"This seems to continue a trend where certain groups feel their rights are being limited, which could affect many people beyond just MAGA supporters."
The first comment isn't substantive, but the second is even worse, adding so much equivocation that it's meaningless. To add insult to injury, the detector also flagged its own suggested revision. Even if it had gone through, accepting these revisions would mean flooding a platform with LLM-speak, which is not conducive to discussion.
Honest feedback: from a user perspective, the suggestions feel frustrating and patronizing, more so than if my comments were simply deleted. I would stop using a site that implemented this.
From a site operator perspective, the kind of discourse it incentivizes seems jagged, subject to much stricter rules if the LLM associates a topic with political controversy. It feels opinionated and unpredictable, and the revisions it suggests are not of a quality I would want on a discussion board. The focus on positive language in particular seems like a reductive view of quality; what is the point of using an LLM if it's only doing basic sentiment analysis?