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.
If you think being an unrepentant liar is good for your cred, fill your boots, I guess.
‘I don’t understand how it works so it’s stupid!’
This is from the report:
Who could’ve seen that rating coming?
Methodical is the opposite of arbitrary. The reason it seems arbitrary to you is that you don’t understand it. As a bare minimum to be critical of MBFC you should understand how it works, understand their methodology, and probably have read their Wikipedia page. Bonus points for seeing what high quality research says about them (spoiler alert: it says you’re wrong). You’re demanding that people take very seriously your misinterpretations and assumptions about something you don’t understand. How is that a reasonable request?