I promised to start sending spot-checks on Santa’s judgements. Here they are. I’ll post them as individual comments, because the formatting is more understandable that way.

NOT BANNED indicates someone who isn’t banned by the algorithm, but almost.

BANNED indicates someone who is banned by the algorithm, but only just.

For each user, you’ll see a snapshot of what comments they have left recently that garnered negative rank (red stripes, downvotes) or positive rank (blue stripes, upvotes). Time goes left to right, the top part of the bar shows their bad or good rank, and the bottom part of the bar links it up to the key down below, showing which posts led to what rankings. Then, down below that, there’s a quote showing a representative example of why the algorithm thinks they’re a problem.

My hope is that by showing where the boundary is, how obnoxious you have to be and how consistently your comments have to get downvotes in order for the algorithm to ban you, people will better understand how it works.

But who knows? Maybe I have it all wrong, and this robot moderator is ushering in a whole new robot dystopia right here on Slrpnk, and this is the evidence. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Edit: Explained the bar code more, and the purpose behind this whole thing.