How a Hack Week Project Encourages People to Be Nice on the Internet

A team of engineers from a company called Sentry developed a GitHub bot named "Be Kind Bot" during an internal hack week project. The purpose of this bot is to encourage kindness on the internet by identifying and calling out rude comments, suggesting alternatives for harsh language, and alerting repository owners when three of their messages are flagged as inappropriate. The team researched sentiment analysis tools but found that existing APIs were not accurate enough for their needs. They eventually used Google's Perspective API, which was designed specifically to identify "bad comments" by ranking their toxicity. While the Be Kind Bot is still a prototype, it represents an effort to improve online communities and make them more inclusive and welcoming.