Hi all!
As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @[email protected]. This bot was introduced because modding can be pretty tough work at times and we are all just volunteers with regular lives. It has been helpful and we would like to keep it around in one form or another.
The [email protected] mods want to give the community a chance to voice their thoughts on some potential changes to the MBFC bot. We have heard concerns that tend to fall into a few buckets. The most common concern we’ve heard is that the bot’s comment is too long. To address this, we’ve implemented a spoiler tag so that users need to click to see more information. We’ve also cut wording about donations that people argued made the bot feel like an ad.
Another common concern people have is with MBFC’s definition of “left” and “right,” which tend to be influenced by the American Overton window. Similarly, some have expressed that they feel MBFC’s process of rating reliability and credibility is opaque and/or subjective. To address this, we have discussed creating our own open source system of scoring news sources. We would essentially start with third-party ratings, including MBFC, and create an aggregate rating. We could also open a path for users to vote, so that any rating would reflect our instance’s opinions of a source. We would love to hear your thoughts on this, as well as suggestions for sources that rate news outlets’ bias, reliability, and/or credibility. Feel free to use this thread to share other constructive criticism about the bot too.
I wish the comment count on a post didn’t include MBFC (or maybe bots in general).
I’ll be honest, that’s probably outside of the scope of what we can do for now. It’s definitely valuable feedback in general and I wish I could offer some kind of solution but that’s probably even outside the control of the instance admins.
Someone can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!
On this topic the information would probably be ideally delivered by flairs/post tags which lemmy doesn’t support yet (AFAICT).
Simply having (bias:left) (factuality: high) would be much better than a whole comment.
Personally I’m in favor of the bot. One complaint I’ve seen that I agree with is that it doesn’t need to float high up in the comments. If it was simply made to not upvote itself, it would stay nearer to the bottom naturally, which I think would be preferable.
Ban it and all bots honestly. I hate seeing a comment on a thread just to find out it’s a bot. If not use like this continues we might see a fresh post with 6 new comments, all of them bots that don’t add to the discussion.
The bot has no purpose. Either an article can be posted or not there’s no reason for the bot prompt. It just looks like thought policing using a bias checker which ‘coincidentally’ prefers what the current Democrats position is.
I can hardly imagine the bot stopping any fake news from being posted either.
Remove it.
No need for a bot. Obvious misinformation should be removed by the mods. Bias is too subjective to be adjudicated by the mods. Just drop it already. It’s consistently downvoted into oblivion for a reason. The feedback has been petty damn obvious. This whole thread is just because the mods are so sure they’re right that they can’t listen to the feedback they already got. Just kill the bot.
Holy moly, people seem to really be upset with this bot. I like it because it can call out when someone is doing something shady with their news sources when people like me (that don’t know news sources by heart) read a posting.
We have a lot of repeat users in here that I personally feel (and I could be wrong) that have ulterior motives, like being a foreign actor spreading misinformation, trying to sew division, and lots of other foreign and domestic actors that are obsessed with one thing and throw the baby out with the bathwater (for example people obsessed with Gaza and Israel war just being nasty in general because they’re angry - I’m not saying that scenario is not wrong and fucked, but this bot can help illuminate patterns in their behavior which can help us regular people tag them accordingly as a single issue participant so they are more informed when engaging that person)
My suggestion is to be very careful about crowd-sourcing the rating process. Nearly every post I go into this bot is super negative on its downvotes. Rather than just simply blocking the bot, people are retaliating against something they don’t agree with. You would likely see that translate to your crowd-sourcing rating also at best. At worst you would see bad actors focused on division and misinformation making a fuckery of it all.
I’m not saying don’t include the community, but brainstorm with this potential pitfall in mind.
I like this community, and want to see it continue to be as factually correct and represented fairly, and appreciate the mods and their ongoing challenges with the people that would seek to upset the apple cart at any opportunity.
I think the bot adds value and applaud the honest effort to make improvements.
It’s fine to use MBFC as a tool when you are writing a comment calling out a bad source. You don’t need a bot for that.
The down voting is for several reasons, Jeff laid it out well. The people who don’t like it’s ratings though have a larger worry that blocking it does not help. If MBFC, and thus the bot, are biased then the entire conversation is shifted around that bias. Blocking is useful if you find something an eyesore. It’s not useful in fighting misinformation.
I hate that I have to expand the section to see the rating. If that could be fixed, it’d be better.
Please God no
Edit: Ooooh, yeah putting the rating outside the spoiler tag sounds great. I thought they were talking about taking away the spoiler tag. My bad.
Addressing the Overton window issue is the main fix I would hope for.
The proposed solution of a home-brewed open-source methodology of determining bias without the Overton influence would be a very welcome improvement in my opinion.
Addressing the Overton window issue is the main fix I would hope for.
This is far and away the most frequently mentioned issue in posts I’ve seen. It’s also the one I would like to see addressed.
I don’t know enough to know how accurate this chart actually is, but I’ve seen it tossed around plenty:
Why does that image only have the sun and the rebel from Canadian media? Both are given more credibility than they deserve, the rebel in particular has history, bunch of white supremacists and alt right personalities were or are still involved, publication absolutely stokes hate and fear.
Edit: I’m still at a loss, why those? The Globe and Mail, McLean’s, The Toronto Star, National Post, CBC all have better reputations domestically (though natpost and the sun are a circle these days and most print media is owned by American Hedge Funds so…), far more likely to actually get the news instead of opinion masquerading as news in one of those.
MBFC and Ad Fontes are both part of the same grift, to artificially raise the value of right-wing journalism, while artificially denigrating left-wing journalism, so their maps of media come out looking like a horseshoe with the apex dominated by corporate advertising conglomerates that use journalism as their hook.
The CEOs of conglomerates will happily fund this propaganda, and a surprising number of people will pay good money to have the ‘horseshoe theory’ lie repeated back to them.
Unfortunately the bot is fatally flawed as long as it’s just repeating MBFC information. I would be interested in a community program but I have the same end worry. What’s the risk that we create an echo chamber? It might be better than an echo chamber based on MBFC ratings but it’s still an issue worth worrying about.
That said I’m down to try a community approach.
I think this tool, while probably well-intended, only adds to the polarization problem of the world.
Can you elaborate? Like, do you think the bot would be better if it didn’t label things as “left” or “right” (ie: remove the bias rating) or do you think the reliability/credibility ratings have the same issue?
Just kill it with fire.
Indeed. Thermite is usually the recommended method to erase hard drives you don’t want to be recoverable.
This thread is a mess.
users: “bot is awful”
mod: “ok so it’s not terrible so that’s good”
I apologize if this thread was misunderstood. Perhaps I was not clear that this was meant for improvements, it is not a vote on removal. Should that vote ever happen, the post would be clear about that.
All of my questions were only seeking to gain more information about people’s feelings. I apologize if it came off as a promise to enact anything in particular or an endorsement of any particular stance on the bot.
Yes, you’ve been very clear from the start that you do not want to remove the bot. However, the feedback you’ve consistently received is that it provides no benefit, is misleading, reductive, and the best improvement you could make would be to remove it. You don’t seem willing or able to respond to that.
Correct, I am unable to supersede admin decisions as a mod. I am here collecting feedback on improvements. Again, I am looking for feedback on improvements, as the decision to remove the bot is not in my control.
Then you’re just wasting both your time and ours.
https://lemmy.world/post/19173515?scrollToComments=true
Please show more kindness in the future.
Ok. Sorry you’ve never been on a functional team before.
It clearly seems as though you aren’t either.
The problem is with MBFC, and you have no control over them. Therefore, the only way you can improve the bot is to remove it entirely.
Remove MBFC? Yes, that’s part of the discussion and the point of this post. The struggle seems to be over the API, but I’d love to have suggestions to bring to the rest of the team. As I have said multiple times, it is not my decision to remove the bot, I’m simply here for suggestions that the rest of the team would be open to.
Whose decision is it, then?
It’s a team decision and I am the newest mod on the team. The main developer of the bot is an admin, who ultimately would be the one to implement any changes.
So it is in part your decision. I’m pretty sure the admins aren’t forcing you to have it here.
During your next shift, you should do something that nobody on your team or your supervisor wants you to do. Lmk how that goes for you
Yeah lol, i cant help but laugh every time i see the mods replies in this thread. i dont understand shit about his train of thought, i dont know if he is denyal or was surprised most people didnt end up aligning with his bias and is in damage control replying nonsense.
The thing I don’t get is why are they so insistent on this change that is so overwhelmingly not wanted?
Who is pushing this and why are so many mods backing it?
$$$$
Probably not an issue with the bot itself, but just FYI, it appears the spoiler tags don’t work on Boost.
Yeah… there was a whole big to do about this. One dev actually quit (can’t remember which one) because it was publicly noted that their app “scored” lower in terms of feature implementation. But feedback has been made available for app developers.
Or Mlem
Get rid of the bot
How do you rate bias without bias? What is the bot’s definition of left or right? How did you build your ratings?
It’s all bullshit, man.
