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Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by jeffw@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world
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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.

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[-] Beetschnapps@lemmy.world 31 points 4 months ago

The bot is basically loud as fuck in a way that disrupts the comment feed.

Imagine how comments should create and add to a conversation. Imagine how various lemmy clients feed or service that conversation….

Now imagine how a double dropdown big as fuck post says “fuck you” to that conversation.

Just please consider how the form of your shit can be just as imposing as the content, which I really appreciate.

Yet somehow your posts always have me thinking “shut the fuck up” which seems antithetical to building a community.

this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
137 points (84.8% liked)

News

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