Disclaimer: The issue here is not completely related to the bot presence, but more about the justification used. People would probably be less annoyed if the mods stated “this is our decision, and it is final”, rather than to try to use admins as an excuse.
As usual, for people looking for other world news communities
- !globalnews@lemmy.zip
- !world@quokk.au (warning: single instance admin)
https://lemmy.world/comment/12825224
https://lemmy.world/comment/12834553
For other threads about the MBFC bot:
.world has been acting sketchy lately
Only “lately?” They take down criticism of the US’ participation in genocide as “misinformation,” yet leave up hasbara. They perma-banned me from political memes for going against the liberal narrative for “misinformation and posturing” despite leaving up the Zionist lie that the Palestinian genocide is a 1000 year conflict. This is also when one of the moderators claimed they weren’t censoring anyone and were incredibly fair on a comment chain calling out their censorship, and refused to elaborate. They would not even tell me how I could edit my comments to comply with their rules.
You might want to have a look at that thread: https://lemmy.ml/post/20225047
Yep, it’s 100% accurate. Even when I asked for clarification so I could abide by their rules, they permabanned me rather than answer.
The reason Lemmy.world censors anti-Democrat takes is because they are “true believers” in liberalism, real “end of history” types.
It’s difficult to understand the various relations between Lemmy instances without reading Marxist and Anarchist theory, because there are so many of both.
I have seen people banned from lemmy.world for linking to the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Why do mods feel the need to lie about something like this? Like seriously. Saying the admins require it, instead of saying they just don’t want to remove it. That’s dumb, and makes them look dumb when the admins see it and deny it, or when people just ask the admins. Life lesson, don’t lie as a moderator about stupid things like this, it only erodes your credibility and doesn’t do anything else for the situation.
Some people are terribly conflict-averse. Not a good trait in a moderator.
Probably more fitting for !fediverselore@lemmy.ca as the mod didn’t actually take any specific mod action. But other than that, from what I see it’s either CLM, or coward mod?
I decided to post it here in the context of the other threads linked at the end of the post.
This bot has been under heavy criticism for a few months now, but mods still impose it to the community.
Given the tiny percent of subscribed users who are bothered enough to actually block the bot, I don’t know if “heavy criticism” is really accurate here. Its more of a (very) vocal minority trying to push their minority view on the vast majority who either like it or don’t care. A 1.2% block rate is an amazingly good result for a bot I’d have thought.
Subscribed users doesn’t seem the best metric to use here compared to active users
That community has 1800 daily active users. If 288 of them block the bot, that’s 16%. Also, the 288 are local users, what about remote users?
using Lemmy 0.19.5 logic for counting local active weekly users, which includes all non-bot users that posted, commented or voted in the community, the number is about 3.15k. percentage wise, using the same calculation as in my other comment, the overlap with users that blocked the bot is at around 9.1% with 286 users blocking it. looking at active monthly users, this changes the numbers to about 5.7k active local users with 443 blocking it, which is about 7.7%.
for remote users these metrics cannot be pulled, as blocks are only visible to the blocking users instance.
Thank you for the additional data
Interesting. What ranking, out of all users who are blocked, does that 286 put the MBFC bot at? In terms of the most blocked accounts on lemmy.world?
4th place across all blocks by LW users.
the 3 ahead of it are 2 nsfw posters and a rather active user with political views not shared by most other users. note that 286 is just the overlap of weekly active users in the community that have blocked the account, not the total number of blocks.
a rather active user with political views not shared by most other users
Hahahahaha. Well put. I’ve also been vocal about my confusion that not much moderation-wise is being done about that user.
If I’m honest, it seems like the moderation team in general is messing up by how unresponsive they’re being to the community as a whole, with those two accounts as good examples. I don’t think it’s a noisy minority. Just look at the votes. Votes aren’t everything, but they’re a good straw poll for how people feel, and I don’t see how you can look at that voting pattern and say it’s 1% of the users that don’t like the account. It’s more than that, it’s a wide majority, and then also, some minority of them are willing to be vocal at length about why.
I appreciate the response. It’s interesting and I’m not trying to put down the work of the admin team by saying these things. I’m just confused by the breakdown in communication and the dogmatic insistence on a certain way of looking at it, that’s at odds with way almost all of the community looks at it. That and the lack of communication which is the main thrust of the post here.
It’s your instance, you can do what you like. I’m just saying my reading of the situation as an amateur observer.
I see what your saying, but it’s just speculation without hard numbers. Personally I have no skin in the game either way, and the bot doesn’t bother me. So for me it’s a bit of a non-issue. I was just trying to get a data-based view of how much of a problem is really is. Sure, the data could be sliced and diced differently to paint a different picture. That’s the nature of statistics.
But whatever the result, I still think it’s pretty unfair to call out individual mods for not banning the bot. I’d also think twice before banning one of db0s bots. There’s a power dynamic at play there. That’s my main concern, and I don’t think Jordan deserves to be called out in particular given the nature of his comments on this, which speak to a feeling of vulnerability. I have empathy for the guy, that’s all. Is it worth all this personal vitriol towards someone just because you guys don’t like some default setting in an app that can easily be turned off? Imo it’s definitely not a case of power tripping, even if you hate the bot. Peace 🙏.
As I stated at the beginning of the post
The issue here is not completely related to the bot presence, but more about the justification used. People would probably be less annoyed if the mods stated “this is our decision, and it is final”, rather than to try to use admins as an excuse.
Peace ✌️
Seems harsh tbh, if Jordan was the only mod then it would be his sole decision but afaik that’s not the situation. There are six mods in that community and presumably they operate on a consensus basis with a decision like this. The bot was obviously implemented by the instance admin. So where’s the lie exactly?
Also people can block that bot if they don’t want to see it. Some people are just obsessed with it for some reason. It’d be interesting to know what percent of LW users have blocked it - that’d give a better idea of how unpopular it is or whether it’s a vocal minority issue. Any stats on that @MrKaplan@lemmy.world ?
There are six mods in that community and presumably they operate on a consensus basis with a decision like this.
I’ve been a part of and seen dysfunctional mod teams in the past. There’s no guarantee of consensus. There’s not even a guarantee of all six mods being aware that there’s a dispute - especially since Lemmy’s mod tools are not the greatest.
288 of local users that are also subscribed to !world@lemmy.world blocked the bot, which is about 1.2%.
when it comes to the topic of lying, it seems more like a misunderstanding from what i’ve heard after these comments were written.
I think that clarifies things for me. Clearly it’s a vocal minority, who can simply block the bot.
I don’t block the bot because it’s misinformation that deserves to be downvoted. MBFCs idea of bias is clearly from an anarcho right wing point of view instead of objective, which is why they list mainstream, fact based news, at the same level as libertarian extremists and GOP campaign websites.
So yeah. The literal first thing I do in a comment section is downvote the bot.
I agree with you that some of their ratings are questionable. It seems an impossible task to find any authoritative source of fact checking that doesn’t have some inherent biases of its own. I mean, a lot of folks on the left regard RT and Al Jazeera as high credibility news organisations, and folks on the right still trust Fox News. The situation is a bit insane.
You have to go far left before RT is considered credible again. AJ’s reputation is because they usually are unbiased in the American domestic section. They get as bad as RT the second it’s international news though.
I don’t block the bot because people sometimes respond to it with things that are worth interacting with. Yet I hate the bot. The bot is overwhelmingly downvoted (which people who block it could not do) in just about every instance it pops up.
Wow, much drama.
It sounds like adding one sentence to the effect that the ratings are centered using the USA metric would go so very far. Like adding units to a temperature measurement - someone could argue that they prefer Celsius (or Kelvin or whatever) to Fahrenheit, but at least Fahrenheit is better than no unit designation at all.
But the admins and mods also seem so very, very tired of all the BS that they have to wade through, that they aren’t all that receptive anymore. I sympathize.
Part of the drama seems to be that buried underneath all the REEEEE responses, there are legitimate underlying worldview/POV issues, namely whether a bad implementation of a good idea is at all helpful vs. the purity argument that nothing that I don’t like can be allowed to exist.
And ultimately, while I did see one heartwarming exception (backed up with admin support by calling for such), the vast majority of people simply complain about wanting better-er-est service entirely for free. As opposed to making an alternative, e.g. a different news community on Lemmy, which would require actual effort put forth by people volunteering their time as mods. Which probably should be done anyway to avoid the monolithic mega-community structures that we all tried to get away from on Reddit - and has been done in at least two cases, though most people commenting seemed entirely unaware of that.
And then the justification issue on top of all of that messy background as well.
But the admins and mods also seem so very, very tired of all the BS that they have to wade through, that they aren’t all that receptive anymore. I sympathize.
There’s a long history of text discussion forums where a sizable number of the users get up in arms like this, and it usually precedes people abandoning the forum. It happened on Slashdot, then Digg, and recently on Reddit.
The people who post the stories and write the comments create the forum and make it continue. I’m not trying to discount the hard, unappreciated work that mods and administrators do. But there seems to be this common misperception that because they do that hard, unappreciated work, it’s okay for them to ignore the community when it speaks with a clear and cohesive voice that something is a problem. People have all kinds of options for where to spend their “typing on the internet” time, and it’s pretty easy to switch.
Maybe it’s because anyone who’s in that moderation role is accustomed to dealing with people whining about nonsense, and a lot of members of the community making a big deal about stuff that doesn’t matter, and so it’s sometimes hard for them to recognize a valid concern that’s widely shared by the community. I don’t know. Like I say, I’m not trying to say I don’t appreciate the unrewarding work of moderation. But “it’s not that important” cuts both ways. If you treat your forum and the way people want it to be as a bunch of distracting noise, they’re going decide you’re a waste of time and go on their way, and once that reputation as a shit pile is solidly established about a particular forum, it tends to be permanent.
What do you think now the block rate has been published in the comments? Should communities change their defaults to cater to the vocal 1.2% of subscribers who can (and have) easily blocked the bot anyway, or make the assumption that 98.8% of users either don’t care, or find it useful, and cater to them instead? A vocal minority like that can make a lot of noise, but it seems pretty clear they aren’t representative of the vast majority of users.
I like to get on the bus playing music on my phone at full volume. 3 people told me today that they want me to turn it off. There were 35 people on the bus, so clearly 91% of the people on the bus want to rock out with me.
Edit: A better analogy is that 3,500 people in the city have bus passes, and 18 people have been on a bus with me and told me to turn off my music or bought themselves headphones since I’ve been doing this every day, but the general flaw should be apparent.
Edit: @Blaze@feddit.org makes an excellent point. The better analogy is that 3,500 people in the city have bus passes, I’ve seen 35 people on the bus wearing noise-cancelling headphones at some point, and the number of people who’ve asked me to stop doing it is irrelevant to me.
Someone else pointed out that not blocking the bot allows people to still downvote it to show their constant unhappiness with it
Very well put.
If it helps to reveal my personal bias: I recall personally taking a look at that bot when it first came out, and commenting against it, plus downvoting it often after that. I did not go so far as to block it but nowadays I do simply ignore it every time I see it. I am not a fan - and this despite the fact that I consistently say things along the lines that we (as humans, and a global Lemmy/Fediverse community) NEED such a tool.
Though after reading through the comments, I have more respect for it than I once did. It seems an imperfect solution to a difficult problem. There are definitely kinks to work out, like how it receives advertising money and looks to be giving kickbacks to the LW admins, as they are the ones receiving either all or at least a portion of that money. Mind you, those funds might not even defray a fraction of their operating costs, so I cannot come down firmly on the side of a “judgement” here, just saying that the deeper one peers into this, the more murky the situation gets, when money gets involved.
Also oddly, I both have more respect for it, yet potentially less than ever before, given how it may inappropriately combine unrelated scores in a manner that serves to further right-wing propaganda. HOWEVER, again, that is nation-dependent, which while this is in reference to a global community, the bot itself seems to originate in the USA, so again… if someone wants to make another one, then they need to get busy and make it happen - which I noted seeing one such example, and the admins say that they welcome it and would love to add it to the bot to present both.
Anyway, what I find most highly striking is how both sides have valid points. Not the REEEEEE obviously (sadly, that appears on both sides as well - which is all the more notable when coming from a position of leadership and authority than a mere user who wants to vent their uninformed opinions), but beyond that, the admins are right to say that e.g. what other options are available that do not cost money that is not available to be spent? And yes, as you pointed out, the community has a valid point that they don’t want to merely block it and move on, b/c then new users are going to still be exposed to it - if it is true that it is a bad thing, then it needs to be opposed from existing at all, or at least the labelling must be substantially improved. “First they came for…” means that we live in a global society, so that things that impact others (the least of these…) should be cared about as well, rather than our concern restricted to solely those matters that affect us directly.
And too, the community PAYS for the admins. I don’t know how much, but some, so there is a sense of “ownership” there. Hence people not wanting to simply switch over to e.g. !globalnews@lemmy.zip, which is quite a nice alternative even if people don’t seem to know about it (lemmy.zip says that it has 2.72K active users/month, compared to lemmy.world saying that !world@lemmy.world has 12K).
Another aspect is how the bot must be “opt-out” rather than opt-in. Much like receiving updates from ChapoTrapHouse or people’s comments from lemmy.ml are on so very many instances (especially lemm.ee) - there are some things that should be opt-in, rather than people exposed to that crap first and then they have to opt-out. The counterpoint is that the technology available for Lemmy suck ass; and yet with the heavy still further counterpoint that Lemmy is still better than most anything else I have ever seen? So the admins seem to have a point that while the tool being opt-out rather than opt-in is not ideal, that is a limitation that they are constrained to having to work with.
Ultimately, as you said, it boils down to (like Reddit): will people simply put up with it, or move? !globalnews@lemmy.zip exists, and !world@quokk.au seems more problematic but it too, and someone can always create another. Or someone can do the hard work to create actual GitHub repo feature requests, like adding in a sentence to say how much the bot is biased towards the USA definitions of left and right, or they could create a post to talk about it. MOST people talking about it though - including myself - are not all that well-informed about the situation, especially prior to reading these links that Blaze offered today. Thus it will require someone actually stepping up to do work, or else what good does all the complaining do? That much at least I understand from the admin & mod’s perspectives, even as I also understand the other side’s POV that the situation is far from ideal, and might even be a for-profit conspiracy to drive up advertising revenue from their tool, on their instance, in their community, that nonetheless uses (abuses?) the federation principles to be sent out to people around the world. Thus the situation represents a microcosm of “news” in general around the world: ultimately, who is going to pay for it, and if nobody, then how can we complain when it goes away (or awry)?
This ofc is a lot of words to say that “I do not know fully what is going on, but it’s interesting nonetheless”. :-)
there is no money involved for lemmy.world.
we are not paying for access to the MBFC database, they provide this for us free of charge, and we also don’t receive any money from MBFC.
the community PAYS for the admins
this is straight up wrong, or at the very least misleading. LW/FHF admins receive zero money from any of the donations, all time spent is volunteered.
