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5 people, including 2 doctors, charged in investigation into Matthew Perry's death (www.denver7.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Bad bot. Just don't comment if you don't know anything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Everyone's got such a huge hate boner for this bot, but I have no idea why.

In this case, by saying it doesn't have info on the source it clues user into the fact that it's not a very large or popular source, which is an extra bit of data readers can take with them even if they don't do any more research beyond that.

If it was my bot, I would probably program it to do that, rather than do nothing in cases like this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

My issues are:

Limited usefulness: I can visit MBFC on my own if I want to. A single-purpose bot is annoying.
MBFC rankings out-of-context aren't helpful: NYTimes can publish the most out-of-touch editorial and the bot says "Highly Factual", while LGBTQNation can post a hard-hitting investigative piece and the bot says "Mostly Factual". The bot didn't read the articles.
Adding a bias rating to every article creates bias: People who treat the bot's rating as a prediction of the value of the linked article, aren't approaching the article with a neutral point of view.
MBFC is biased. The work they do is important, and the information on their site can be useful, but as with any media organization, it's got an agenda.
The bot admin's "block it if you don't like it" philosophy shows zero interest in developing a tool that the community wants, just for building a tool that blasts as much MBFC data across Lemmy as possible.

Honestly, if this was just a bot that gave links to information about the source, like MBFC, Wikipedia, the source site's official about page, info about parent companies, info on the author of the article, etc., I would probably upvote it. A tool that gives me the power to review several different sources of information and come to my own conclusion would be great.

It's the fact that it tries to steer people's perception of the article by giving your MBFC'S score of the publisher out-of-context that bothers me. I don't want a bot telling me how to feel about every media source.

And failing silently is a good failure mode. This top level post here is worthless.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I appreciate you sharing your views on this. You make some good points.