bDAO Bots & AI Ethics - Nanny State Dictators, or Behaviour Guidance Opportunity?

Governance
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I’m currently serving a 2.5 day ban from bDAO Discord - my mobile says - for sharing a link.

A whole DAO ban, based on sharing in Research Guild.

A question asked in RG was are there any topics for research. SInce I’m researching into WG / Guild / Project / DAO workflows, I wanted to share my recent article, which has been approved for publication by Bankless Publication.

I view this instant ban as needless, crude, detrimental to DAO health, and unjustly exclusionary. I thought DAOs were open door, inclusive, creative kinds of places.

Actually I think bDAO still is a great place, but that this is a crude piece of bot design of the worst order. And I also think bDAO can do better in its bot design. How so?

AI Ethics
This is a hot topic across the digital world, and I’d hope bDAO can show AI Ethics in action.

Surely, making bot design that involves bDAO contributors should have a voting mechanism attached, for the sake of ethics? And that this voting mechanism is made public during bot design and before commissioning any dev work, to better understand “unintended consequences”?

Bot Design
If this design is intended on a per channel / guild basis, then channels / guilds need to opt in, and say they are doing so in their start here channels. Timeouts and bans should not be on a Discord wide basis, and I suggest 2 days or more is a crazy time span unless for persistent offenders, POs. (NB Subsequent discovery, the 2 days is on my mobile, not the desktop!) For POs, I believe Discord itself can ban offenders, and for now that this is a manual last resort. Maybe bot design can handle this, but I refer to my comments above about AI Ethics.

Where is the community learning curve design in the bot design thinking?

Community Learning Curves
If the Guild wants its community to learn, then have warning stages that the bot operates to.

  1. First warning: risk and length of timeout / ban
  2. Final warning: imminent timeout / ban, risk and length
  3. Timeout / ban

Overriding ethos: what do warning recipients need to do to avoid timeouts?

This at least incorporates a learning curve, and on a guild by guild, project by project etc. basis

I welcome thoughts and suggestions here, current bot design may make life easier for role holders, but it will dismay genuine contributors and bDAO enthusiasts.

Please indicate your support for this, or list your objections, I’m happy to discuss.

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Hey @links @hirokennelly @NFThinker @Trewkat , I welcome your views, as my wise advisors!

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I agree that ideal bot design could be a little less broad-brush, but I have no idea what is possible. It would probably have been helpful to have a conversation with the team responsible for the bot before posting here, so that some viable operational options for discussion could be included. :slightly_smiling_face:

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It’s important to note that the reason you got banned was because you aren’t L1, L2, or GP. I assume the idea behind this is: contributors can share links, non-contributors cannot. Also I think you could probably talk to Infosec to get your ban revoked, as it seems to be a clear mistake.

I’m not against people refining our bot designs, but TBH the rules don’t seem terrible to me at the moment. I think being a contributor is a decent bar for sharing links.

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