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Hey everyone!
If you do not know me, my name is Francis. I have been a DEV user for the past 6 months now. I am currently a DEV Community Mod where my job is to ensure the community abides the DEV's Mission and following best practices when it comes to articles and interacting with the community. A guide for interacting with the community can be found here:
With the recent surges of Sloan messages, I want to let you know a few things:
- Sloan, by itself, does not detect AI-generated articles or is "alive". It is sent via human (which is me for the most case. Not sure who else uses Sloan other than the internal DEV team).
- ClassifierAI, the project I did with @codingwithjiro has NOTHING to do with the moderation process on DEV.
- The deciding factor on sending the Sloan message comes down to the following: User activity, reading the article in its entirety, running via GPTzero.
I want to create a thread that allows other to ask questions and get a quick response. @ben, @jess and the rest of the DEV Team are usually busy, especially with the acquisition of Major League Hacking. A lot is happening behind the scenes and I believe that I can answer most of the community's questions on DEV.
As a result, I thought it would be nice to take in questions the community has to offer!
If you have questions about:
- AI usage on DEV and ways I can improve my moderation.
- Questions on how to use DEV.
- What a Community Mod can and cannot do.
- Other fun icebreakers.
Let me know! Any internal questions such as Forem or how the team runs can be contact to the DEV team email: yo@dev.to (DONT BE AFRAID TO ASK FIRST. If I can't answer it, I will let you know).
Top comments (8)
Hey all, just wanted to share that we'll be updating our general moderation guidelines and tooling for the community soon.
A lot goes on behind-the-scenes that's a combination of manual moderation and automated spam detection. There is a lot of nuance here that requires constant adjustment and rebalancing.
I'll note that there are hundreds of mods with the ability to send messages via Sloan, so not all of it has fallen on Francis's shoulders - though we deeply appreciate his dedication to the the community, and he is by far one of our most active volunteer moderators.
We'll share a more substantial update on community moderation and our perspective on AI-assisted content in the next few weeks.
This is a big priority for us going forward after lots of work to catch up with new demands of moderation in this age. I think we'll land in a really good place.
I'll ask the first question. How many Sloan warnings does it take before an account gets flagged? And will there be a notification when that happens?
Great first question! and appreciate the communication we had on @dannwaneri's post for this concern.
In my opinion this depends on the user's activity and how they are using DEV. For example, let's say a person has never been caught but their profile shows the following:
If this was the case, it will be either a single warning message before flag or flagged the account entirely.
However, if it was a genuine mistake and did not know before hand, I usually go with a few warnings before hand. Of course, I make mistakes and it could vary.
There are other deciding factors based on how long they are on DEV and other things, but those are the most common.
I never been Flagged from Sloan before, but I would assume it would be like any other comments (though sometimes dev.to email notification is slow. One time I got an email notification that someone commented on my post 3 days ago lol). Can you clarify to me?
Thanks :D
One more thing — my article "I Spent 3 Months Training An AI. My VP 'Reallocated' It. Then I Got Two Calls At 1 AM." (dev.to/xulingfeng/i-spent-3-months...) still can't be found in search. Could you take a look? The latest article is fine now.🤣
Email notifications from DEV have always been prompt for me. But I never received any notification about my account being flagged.
My suggestion: add a system-level notification in the community's notification center to inform users if there's anything unusual with their account and how to improve it — if that's possible.
I feel like I got it entirely wrong 😅. I honestly thought Sloan was an actual person. When I got a Sloan message about a formatting issue on one of my posts, I assumed you had asked Sloan to comment under my post. I didn't realize Sloan was more of a moderation system/persona and that the moderator was actually sending the message themselves. Thanks for clearing that up!
Great insights! It's always interesting to hear about the experiences and challenges that come with being a community moderator. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
One question: What's the most common mistake new community members make, and how can they avoid it?