The news mod team has asked to no longer be a part of the project until we have a composite tool that polls multiple sources for a more balanced view.
It will take a few hours, but FOR NOW there won’t be a bot giving reviews of the source.
The goal was simple: make it easier to show biased sources. This was to give you and the mods a better view of what we were looking at.
The mod team is in agreement: one source of truth isn’t enough. We are working on a tool to give a composite score, from multiple sources, all open source.
I’m absolutely for the bot and I know I’m not alone. I like having it and I find it useful. I don’t know why other people think it’s “a source of truth” like I’m some mindless sheep who can’t think on my own. I can and do take its rating with a grain of salt.
I don’t like sports but you don’t see me asking admins to remove those subs. It’s selfish of people to ask for it to take it down for everyone. A good aspect of using Lemmy is being able to customize your experience–so do that. If you don’t like bots, hide them all in the settings or block them individually. It’s that simple.
Now that I think of it, maybe Lemmy should ask new users how they want to experience the site when creating their accounts.
Because a lot of people don’t spend effort researching the sources. When the mods present MBFC ratings on each post without any explanation or context, it’s an endorsement of MBFC and their opinion, and presents it as a reliable source.
If people want to do the research to evaluate a source, they can do that on their own. Presenting a biased source like MBFC is counterproductive to that goal.
I don’t think that’s fair or true, especially on Lemmy. We don’t need babysitting. And even if it is an endorsement, what examples of reviews do you have that call MBFC into question? I say we don’t bog down ourselves with whether they labeled something center-left that may be center-right or whatnot. What matters is the facts. Everyone can have a say in how they interpret whatever slant they find. Nobody takes it as the ultimate judge. We don’t need it to be impeccably accurate and perfect, either.
In my case, I pay little attention to the rating on sources I already trust. Instead, I use it to hold obvious propagandists to face the quality of their posts. I have many instances of that happening. There’s value in this.
This is one way to get started doing that. It’s a convenient shortcut for the search I was going to do anyway. I’m surprised you preach about source evaluation and push back on this in a post about allowing for multiple sources.