[META] MBFC bot
[META] MBFC bot
The news mod team has asked to no longer be a part of the project until we have a composite tool that polls multiple sources for a more balanced view.
It will take a few hours, but FOR NOW there won't be a bot giving reviews of the source.
The goal was simple: make it easier to show biased sources. This was to give you and the mods a better view of what we were looking at.
The mod team is in agreement: one source of truth isn't enough. We are working on a tool to give a composite score, from multiple sources, all open source.
You're viewing part of a thread.
The 10 posts with the most downvotes are all requests to remove the bot.
These are some highlights from the top 12 posts sorted by "top"...
- "My personal view is to remove the bot."
- "One problem I’ve noticed is that the bot doesn’t differentiate between news articles and opinion pieces."
- "You don’t need every post to have a comment basically saying “this source is ok”
- "I think it should be removed"
- "My personal view is that the bot provides a net negative, and should be removed." <- me
- "Partisan fact-checking sites are worse than no fact-checking at all."
- "Remove it."
- "MBFC’s ratings for “factual reporting” are a joke."
- "This thread is a mess." <- also me, sorry
- "The bot is basically a spammer saying “THIS ARTICLE SUCKS EVEN THOUGH I DIDN’T READ IT” on every damn post. If that was a normal user account you’d ban it."
- "The majority of feedback has been negative. I can’t recall a single person arguing in its favor, but I can think of many, myself included, arguing against it."
- "In literally every thread I’ve seen it post in, it gets downvoted to hell."
To put it charitably, 2 and 6 are only mildly critical or express tepid support, at best. The remainder are... something less than supportive.
I understand that this is not a democracy, and that it's ultimately up to your good selves to guide the community as you see fit. However, I think there are valid criticisms to be made regarding your collective ability to engage with feedback.
First, admins have pointed out that dozens of accounts (now banned) were being used to artificially boost certain kinds of feedback and bury others, so if we're not allowed to point to votes as a source of valid information, then sorting by "top" is equally invalid. Those could simply have been the comments those alts decided they wanted to push to the top, to make their point.
Second, we're volunteers who have a few hours set aside each day to open a discussion into things that need to be updated or changed, and the vitriol that's been hurled at us is disproportionate compared to the ostensible "damage" being done by a single automated script. One moderator threatened to resign over the hate that's been blasted into their face. It took us less than two weeks to post a request for feedback, and then to act on that feedback. You (the disapprovers) all got exactly what you wanted. Pardon me for being blunt, but what the hell else are you expecting from us?
As stated elsewhere in the thread, my vote audit shows no participation from any of the 29 banned sock accounts the in the !news feedback thread, or this one for that matter. Please take the votes more seriously. If you'd like to spread FUD about the legitimacy of a vote, ask an admin to audit them first so you can state with evidence that a specific vote has been manipulated.
People trust the software to tell them what others are thinking, and if you successfully spread the false idea that votes that disagree with you are manipulated, you're not just arguing in bad faith, you're undermining the federated system we should all want to succeed.
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Thank you. I don't have that kind of audit authority and all we were told is that vote manipulation was occurring. We'd love to have you join the team if you'd like to help.
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We took all of the feedback seriously because the bot is gone. I'm really not sure why people keep pretending like we haven't already acted on it.
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That you'd call this "spreading FUD" or"bad faith" is, frankly, insulting. I can only act on the information I have. In the end, I said that manipulation made assessing the situation difficult, but we still followed through accordingly. We are volunteering our time, and you lying about our intentions isn't helping either.
I only have a few hours per day to devote to this. If you think you can do better, then step up.
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I'm sorry if I come across as preachy in the below post, but I wanted to try and explain to you where the critique is coming from. And also that it's not personal or any widespread resentment.
I (and many others) get what a thankless and also necessary job moderating is. It's not easy to do it well, it's frustrating, it's thankless and without it the community would be dead. But being a moderator and sticking out your neck brings you exposure and you are guaranteed to meet more asshats than you ever thought existed. But the users are not one homogenous group, it's not because one user has flung abuse at moderators, that all users are now suddenly resentful of moderators.
The person you are replying to, put a good bit of time in listing what comments were most up voted, which are probably the comments that found most support amongst the users in that thread. In the same way that we should not be dismissive of what you do or say, you shouldn't be dismissive of what others do or say (or up vote). Mutual respect and all that.
Self reflection is also important, it's important to realize and accept that it is possible to be wrong about something. Doing a mea culpa and moving on is far easier in the long term than doubling down and digging a deeper hole, yet it's a lot rarer because it hurts our ego in the short term.
Their final point about a problem with handling feedback rings true to me:
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You (not you personally, but the team that did that feedback thread) have apparently treated up- and down votes on a thread as a poll and a popular mandate for action, but up- and down votes are not a poll and most (probably most) people don't use them as such.
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Up- and down votes on comments are useful for finding which remarks resonated with or turned away other users. They are not a poll either, and most upvoted are not automatically most correct at all, but they give you a chance to read the room.
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You (now you personally) have thrown shade on the people that up voted comments against the bot, by insinuating that those people might have been bots themselves and that therefore their opinions are irrelevant. Yes it's possible that there are some users using alts, but all those users? Not very likely.
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The best feedback I saw in that thread was not in the up or down votes, it was in the comments themselves. There were some very compelling arguments as to why using a biased site to display bias, was a bad idea. Those comments also had quite a bit of upvotes, so the way I read the room, that was a popular sentiment.
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The person you are replying to made a few arguments and one scathing critique which they probably hoped that you would improve on in the future. Imo a polite disagreement with your previous statements. You respond by being dismissive of his arguments and acting like it's a personal attack. They were sticking to facts, you're making it about you as a person. I really don't think that was their intent.
Yes, it is personal. The fact that one mod almost resigned over this means that whether or not people intended for it to be, the criticism was in some cases very personal. And we have evidence that some (never said "all") voting was manipulated, which makes our job more difficult because there's no way to tell how many of those comments were upvoted because many people agreed with them, versus a few people agreeing with them so intensely that they were willing to break the rules to prove their point. At the end of the day, people gave feedback, we reviewed it, and the bot is gone. We didn't ask for it to be created, had no role in coding it, didn't ask for it to be rolled out, didn't turn it on, couldn't change it, couldn't turn it off, and gave the admins time to try their experiment while we determined whether or not it made sense for the community. It wasn't our bot.
We're here in a thread discussing the next incarnation of the bot which presumably will be coded by a mod and under your control?
That's not what open source means (by the way, that was yet another user feedback suggestion that we are working to implement).
A bot may be coded by a mod, under your control, and open source. They are not mutually exclusive characteristics.
Maybe. Nothing has been developed yet, so everything is very much up in the air.
Damn what a shame, guy almost stopped being a moderator on an internet forum, would have been a grave tragedy
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We want the bot gone. That's it. It's really that simple.
However, I think there are valid criticisms to be made regarding your collective ability to engage with feedback.
I don't think that the mod team has ever said that there is not some valid criticism. Feedback from the community (not just the !News community) is precisely why we have made multiple changes to the way this functions, the layout, and inclusion of different sources.
There is a vocal minority of the community that feels the need to swear, engage in personal attacks, manipulate votes, accuse others of being paid actors, insist that "everyone" agrees with them, and so forth, which does tend to make it difficult to engage in a forthright discussion about what is best for the community.
I don’t think that the mod team has ever said that there is not some valid criticism.
That's not what an inability to engage with feedback means though, it means genuinely listening to the perspectives of others even in cases where it's inconvenient, unexpected, unpleasant, and yes in some cases presented in an offensive manner.
That doesn't mean you need to just allow people to spew hatred and vitriol at you - of course you can call out that kind of behavior where you see it. It's probably fair to say that some Lemmy users would struggle to express themselves on topics they feel strongly about without being offensive.
That said, I suspect that a lot of the vitriol you've encountered on this topic has in some part been provoked by the mods collective reluctance to actually acknowledge the many shortcomings of this bot or any potential reincarnation.
I mean the following in as congenial a manner as possible, but the comment of yours I replied to earlier (regarding the most downvoted comments in the other thread) seemed quite dismissive. You may not have intended it as such, nevertheless that's how it appears. Engaging with that feedback would mean considering the actual content of those comments with a charitable attitude? JonsJava similarly quoting vote counts for the other post as a means to disregard concerns.
Again, in as congenial and constructive a manner as possible, Blackbeard has revealed that there has been some vote manipulation which I acknowledge has frustrated things from your perspective, but again the narrative that "there is a vocal minority opposing the bot and inflating comments in opposition to the bot" is dismissive of the very real issues extant.
I'm not alone in feeling exasperated by the cycle of request feedback > dismiss feedback.
None of the feedback has been dismissed. I don't know how to say that any more clearly.
We read every comment. We have worked with other moderators of multiple communities to implement changes based on the feedback we received from the very beginning. This thread is just one of those examples. The mods and users are on the same side in this effort.
Please understand: the only people who are dismissing user feedback are other users when they say things like "no one wants this." That's literally dismissing the many users who express that they find it beneficial. We are working on developing community resources that will meet the needs of most of the people here. That process takes time because we are an asyncronous team of volunteers.
Edit: I should note that the "no one wants this" comment was not meant as a personal attack. I only intended it as a typical example of a reductive, unhelpful, and dismissive comment. I didn't realize until after that you posted another comment on this thread that was substantially similar. My apologies for the inadvertent example.
Perhaps it is true that you've considered all feedback, but I'm sure you can acknowledge my point that comments from mods suggesting that the most downvoted comments are all opposition to the bot, or that votes on upvoted comments ought to be ignored because of vote manipulation might cause those who are opposed to feel as though their opinions have been dismissed.
Regardless, while I look forward to your response should you wish to offer one, I've had my say and I feel as though I've been heard.
or that votes on upvoted comments ought to be ignored because of vote manipulation
No one on the mod team said that. If you're going to appeal that we be honest in our engagement, the least you can do is be honest in yours.
That was my good faith attempt to paraphrase this comment:
sorting by "top" is equally invalid
I don't think that's a dishonest or disingenuous interpretation.
Yes, cutting a snippet out of a sentence with broader context is a classic form of bad faith argumentation:
if we’re not allowed to point to votes as a source of valid information, then sorting by “top” is equally invalid.
The "if" conditional is pretty fundamental in that sentence. To cut it out and then paraphrase it to mean something it doesn't is one of the oldest tricks in the book.
The rest of the sentence doesn't change the meaning, nor the point I was making?
I've seen mods suggesting that there is nuance and a diversity of opinion. Its often as a counterpoint to users suggesting that there is monolithic opposition from the users, and mods are forcing something that no one wants. When someone claims to speak for the whole community, then their comment gets dozens of downvotes, those votes are relevant feedback as well.
There is a challenge when portions of the community have mutually exclusive preferences. There is a greater challenge when one portion considers any action based on other's preferences unjustifiable.