Asklemmy

48795 readers

604 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

-3

Should Lemmy (or a user) consider potentially adding a profanity counter bot similar to Reddit's u/profanitycounter? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

On Reddit, there is a bot called u/profanitycounter that users could summon to count the number and types of swear words someone had used in their recent comment history.

While it was mostly used for humor or lighthearted callouts, it also sparked discussion around online civility, user behavior, and moderation trends.

With Lemmy growing as a federated alternative to Reddit, I'm curious:

Should Lemmy (or a third-party dev) implement a similar profanity counter bot?

Would such a tool add meaningful engagement, moderation assistance, or humor to the platform?

Or would it be seen as invasive, performative, or redundant given Lemmy's decentralized nature and local moderation policies?

Some possible considerations:

Could such a bot be opt-in or confined to specific communities?

Would this be better as a per-instance moderation tool or a user-invoked script (like tagging a bot)?

How would it handle federation? Would it scan only local comments, or across instances?

Could it be useful as a moderation analytics tool, or does it risk shaming users?

Would love to hear from both devs and moderators—whether this kind of bot aligns with Lemmy’s goals, or if it's best left in Reddit’s history books.

I would love to attempt something like this, but I lack both the time and energy.

https://www.reddit.com/u/profanitycounter/s/6cwlJ9sjIG

https://www.reddit.com/r/profanitycounter/s/V6bvzqUrrH

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Rather not. One of the worst things about Reddit comments was the bot clutter.

Everyone has their own idea for a bot that’s interesting or funny or whatever, and maybe some of them are, but in the end there are just too many. You’d have a bot that corrects spelling errors, a bot to call that one pedantic, and a bunch of people voting “bad bot” on both, and before you know it half of the comments are just noise that didn’t need to be there.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

We do have a this is a bot account user setting, and it's possible to block bot accounts so you never see them.

But a profanity bot seems pretty useless to me.