Unfortunately the bot is fatally flawed as long as it's just repeating MBFC information. I would be interested in a community program but I have the same end worry. What's the risk that we create an echo chamber? It might be better than an echo chamber based on MBFC ratings but it's still an issue worth worrying about.

That said I'm down to try a community approach.

I wound up blocking your shitty bot because it spammed pretty much every post.

Get rid of the bot

Addressing the Overton window issue is the main fix I would hope for.

The proposed solution of a home-brewed open-source methodology of determining bias without the Overton influence would be a very welcome improvement in my opinion.

Probably not an issue with the bot itself, but just FYI, it appears the spoiler tags don't work on Boost.

Credibility isn't subjective. It should be a hard value.

Orientation is indeed subjective and unless in the extremes should (imo) not be defined

This bot was introduced because modding can be pretty tough work at times and we are all just volunteers with regular lives.

Then maybe it can be an internal thing only. Let people do their own critical thinking. I believe that if you're on Lemmy, you can make informed decision.

Personally I'm in favor of the bot. One complaint I've seen that I agree with is that it doesn't need to float high up in the comments. If it was simply made to not upvote itself, it would stay nearer to the bottom naturally, which I think would be preferable.

How about just finally making the bot open source and let people comment or contribute there?

Although I do see that that bot has a very slight right wing bias I like it. It prevents the normalization of the use of literal propaganda outlets as news sources.

I have a suggestion that might be a good compromise.

The bot only comments on posts that are from less factual news sources or are from extreme ends of the spectrum.

On a post from the AP the bot would just not comment.

On a post from Alex Jones or RT the bot would post a warning.

That way there is less “spam”, but people are made aware when misinformation or propaganda is being pushed.

Also with such a system smaller biasses are less relevant and therefore become less important.

Not directly related to MBFC bot, but what's your opinion on other moderation ideas to improve the nature of the discussion? Something Awful forums have strawmanning as a bannable offense. If someone says X, and you say they said Y which is clearly different from X, you can get a temp ban. It works well enough that they charge a not-tiny amount of money to participate and they've had a thriving community for longer than more existing social media has been alive. They're absolutely ruthless about someone who's being tricksy or pointlessly hostile with their argumentation style simply isn't allowed to participate.

I'm not trying to make more work for the moderators. I recognize that side of it... the whole:

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.

... makes perfect sense to me. I get the idea of mass-banning sources to get rid of a certain type of bad faith post, and doing it with automation so that it doesn't create more work for the moderators. But to me, things like:

• Blatant strawmanning
• Saying something very specific and factual (e.g. food inflation is 200%) and then making no effort to back it up, just, that's some shit that came into my head and so I felt like saying it and now that I've cluttered up the discussion with it byeeeeee

... create a lot more unpleasantness than just simple rudeness, or posting something from rt.com or whatever so-blatant-that-MBFC-is-useful type propaganda.

I hate that I have to expand the section to see the rating. If that could be fixed, it'd be better.

Bias ratings will always be biased. So aggregate or having multiple sources briefly used in a single small post would work best.