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.
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.
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.