Ask Lemmy

It is essentially the mods forcing an opinion on the validity of every post's source.

The bot is crap. This is how it rates Raw Story, a clickbait factory that churns out shallow articles with dramatic, misleading headlines. It just produces slop for liberal Boomers to fill up their Facebook feed, but based on the bot's reply, you'd think it was the Gaurdian.

I downvote it everytime because of its rightwing bias.

If you say the mainstream corporate news is center left, you're either stupid or you have a right wing agenda.

Personally my biggest gripe is with the formatting, specifically spoilers tags are a terrible choice when the whole thing could be a single sentence with a link. Spoiler tags aren't uniformly implemented and when pointed out the stance is it's the clients fault for not doing spoilers the way the dev wants rather than the devs fault for not using a more standardized approach which just bugs me. If the goal was concise conveyance of information, they missed the mark.

Even if you like the bot you should be downvoting it because that puts it in a predictable spot: at the bottom, without getting in the way of real comments.

Since you asked:

1. The bot provides little "value" vs the noise it creates.

I don't need a bot to tell me that the BBC is a legit news source. Maybe if you flip it around and only publish a message if it's a known scammy website, this might be less spammy. However, this "threshold for scamminess" would be very subjective.

2. This bot is everywhere. This is closely related to the first point ("value" vs noise). It just sprang up one day and I saw it in every single thread, I'd read.

Fortunately, most Lemmy clients allow blocking users - which I've done and I'm much happier with my Lemmy experience.

So the answers in this post are mostly that people are downvoting the bot because it is often wrong and then others defending it by saying “it’s not wrong it’s just based on American politics”.

If the bot reported from a range of sources that reflect a number of different political perspectives I’m sure it’d be more useful outside of the scope of American politics, and therefore wouldn’t get downvoted.

As far as I’m concerned the vote system is working as intended.

The internet is not American. There are no nations on lemmy ✌️

Wait, I haven't seen this bot around?

I've had to block it because it takes up two screens of my phone as my client doesn't support spoiler tags properly. I'm not going to change my client over one noisy bot.

Also MBFC seems to be a bit biased (it's definitely not correct on a few in the UK), as most bias rankings are, it's why services like Ground News use several of these services to make up their ratings. At the end of the day only using MBFC data isn't much better than listening to one guy tell you "yeah they're totally fine"

Finally from what little discussion I've seen with the owner of the bot, they don't seem to be very collaborative with the rest of the community and just shut down criticism.

The responses the admin who added the bot gave to people's concerns when they announced it, weren't that great. (Link)

The Lemmy.world admin disregarded all criticism and just said people shouldn't complain, after just asking for feedback in the post itself

Example:

What a terrible idea.

MBFC is already incredibly biased.

It should be rejected not promoted.

Admin response:

Ok then tell me an alternative we can use in the scale for free.

None? Then pls dont just complain complain complain… And dont suggest improvements.