Hi all!
As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @MediaBiasFactChecker@lemmy.world. 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 !news@lemmy.world 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.
My replies were good faith discussions with the users (except for the one joke above). I don’t control the bot but the mod team has been discussing this. By all means, if you want to blame the mod who took the initiative to solicit feedback, go ahead though. It’s worth noting that I can’t force admins to act though, only supply evidence.
Edit: to be clear, this post was always meant for constructive feedback to improve the bot.
The feedback has been loud and clear, the bot is a shit and most people want it gone. Sorry but most of your replies have been very targeted and the good faith more than debatable, they go from naive to outright omitting the point most people is trying to explain to you. Edit: also to be clear, i dont care if you are not the owner of the bot, as a mod you can ban it.
Yes, I could do whatever I want as a mod, if I want to be removed from the mod team within minutes.
What can i say? I really admire your writing comprehension