Hi all!
As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @[email protected]. 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 [email protected] 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.
It’s tricky because we could probably make 100 rules if we wanted to define every specific type of violation. But a lot of what you’re talking about could fall under Rules 1 and 8, which deal with civility and misinformation. If people are engaging in bad faith, feel free to report them and we’ll investigate.
Hm
I can try it – I generally don’t do reports; I actually don’t even know if reports from mbin will go over properly to Lemmy.
For me it’s more of a vibe than a set of 100 specific rules. The moderation on political Lemmy feels to me like “you have to be nice to people, but you can argue maliciously or be dishonest if you want, that’s all good.” Maybe I am wrong in that though. I would definitely prefer that the vibe be “you can be kind of a jerk, but you need to be honest about where you’re coming from and argue in good faith, and we’ll be vigorous about keeping you out if you’re not.” But maybe it’s fair to ask that I try to file some reports under that philosophy before I assume that they wouldn’t be acted on.