I made a simple mod bot for Lemmy.

It's still "early access", but it's stable and should be fit for everyday use.

I'd be really happy to get some feedback on what kind of features mods would like to see.

If you want to try it in action, go to !bottest@feddit.de. That's the testing community where it currently filters posts with duplicate URLs, same as mentions of Reddit, Lego and other beings-who-must-not-be-named. Feel free to post stuff there and see it get automatically moderated.

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[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Found the luddite, I guess.

The point of automods is to take really simple and repetitive tasks from the human moderators. For example, in one community the moderators spend a lot of time locking duplicate posts.

So for example, there's a cool news post, and over the next few days different people are creating multiple posts linking to the same article instead of searching whether someone else already posted the same thing. Double posts like that suck a bit, since they fracture the discussion, making it hard to follow what's been said. They also decrease the visibility and split the audience between multiple posts containing the same content.

Currently, they have to manually search for and close these double posts, which is both annoying, takes time and is frustrating. An automod can automatically detect these posts, comment with a link to the original post and lock the duplicate ones.

Back on Reddit some mods use bots to detect frequently asked questions and automatically post a response linking to an FAQ thread. This would be possible here as well.

There is no AI or any kind of judgement built in the bot. It doesn't use heuristics or anything. Just really simple rules (currently duplicate detection and regex) to automate the judgement of the mods.

I think you are anthropomorphizing this little script far too much.