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.

  • stormesp@lemm.eeEnglish
    296·
    3 months ago

    @jeffw@lemmy.world Why did you stop replying to posts here? Most people is telling you the bot is bullshit. You stopped commenting in this thread while being active elsewhere, are you going to take action or not?

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
      136·
      2 months ago

      I’m not the admin who created the bot. I’m a mod who is collecting feedback on behalf of the entire mod team.

      Just to be perfectly clear: because I am the face of this feedback, you can feel free to say whatever you want to me. It’s odd that you seem to harbor ill feelings towards me in particular just because I pushed for collecting user feedback on this issue.

      • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
        121·
        2 months ago

        you can feel free to say whatever you want to me

        my cat likes to sit in my window seal but I accidentally knocked the curtain rod down. She has been laying in the bunched up curtain that’s laying on the floor, I think she likes it better than then window seal. However the window is right out the front of the house so anytime I come home after a long day I see her watching me roll up the driveway and it makes me feel good. I don’t know if it would be best to move the bunched up curtain back to the window or let her stay on the floor and not see her when I get home :(

        • jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
          56·
          2 months ago

          Putting aside the bone apple tea moment… I had to replace blinds because of an overzealous dog who loved watching the street. I just had to permanently keep the blinds open for him. Maybe you could do some sort of compromise solution like that? Ig what I’m saying is leave the curtains where they are and buy new ones?