this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024

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Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

210 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Remove it please. It's an obtrusive advertisement for Ground News.

It's incredibly annoying to see comments: 1, only to click the post to see an ad. It makes me less inclined to interact with Lemmy at all. It's the same kind of crap that ruined Reddit.

[+] [email protected] -22 points 2 months ago (3 children)

We want to keep it in some form. Would you prefer not having the Ground News link?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

The overwhelming majority of comments I'm seeing indicate they'd like to see it gone. Why are you opposed to listening to the people who create and consume all of the content in this space?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

We want to keep it in some form.

There's your problem.

You're not really looking for feedback if you've already made up your mind. Stop pretending to listen to the community if you're ignoring the countless blocks and downvotes. That's your feedback right there

How about you remove the bot and then fix whatever problems you have without doubling down on the bot solution? If you want community feedback on mod overburden, I'm sure people will be willing to help with that. But stop forcing the bot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

https://lemmy.world/post/19173515?scrollToComments=true

[+] [email protected] -7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Although this is a fair point, I think that there is a difference between saying, "the moderation team finds it useful and would like to keep it," vs "We have already decided that we are keeping it no matter what."

This discussion is to help us guide the community's next steps from an informed position.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Which of those are you trying to say? Because it very much comes across as the latter when you say stuff like "deleting the bot is not an option" and "off the table".

If you guys find it helpful from a mod perspective, it might be more appropriate to develop some mod tooling, like a browser extension, rather than pushing it on the users.

Edit: so it is the latter, then, got it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Can you elaborate on how it's useful?

Just have it notify the mod team when a post appears from a questionable source.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That would certainly be preferable. I don't think we should be advertising.

Beyond that, it would be much better if there were a way to not have the bot be counted as a comment. Comments are what humans do. They're meant to be interacted with. I can't interact with a bot, other than rolling my eyes at it.