Disclaimer: The issue here is not completely related to the bot presence, but more about the justification used. People would probably be less annoyed if the mods stated “this is our decision, and it is final”, rather than to try to use admins as an excuse.

As usual, for people looking for other world news communities

https://lemmy.world/comment/12825224

https://lemmy.world/comment/12834553

For other threads about the MBFC bot:

  • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    I’m personally trying to stay out of (especially US) politics discussions as much as I can, as I don’t think there’s much to gain there for me anyway while potentially costing a lot of time and energy. I’m not from US, so most of that stuff isn’t anything that is relevant/influenceable for me anyway.

    I haven’t actively looked whether that person has been posting content that is violating our instance rules, that is simply not a reasonable task to do without leads pointing out specific cases. Without supporting their statements, unless they’re violating instance rules we’re generally trying to allow people to communicate their thoughts here without applying political bias to rule enforcement, at least on instance admin level. I can’t speak for community moderators, but I’m sure that there are communities with bias in rule enforcement or even rules themselves in both directions. If LW users or users in LW communities are violating LW instance rules, we recommend reporting them with references directly to admins, which will bypass community moderators, so our admin team can review it.

    I’m also not directly involved in how the bot is used/discussed, but I did have a look at votes targeting the account in the past and there were several accounts heavily involved in automated or at least not legitimate votes, which on its own is generally also a violation of our ToS and would usually lead to a ban. Votes are therefore not really something that can reasonably considered at face value as peoples opinion either, as they’re skewed by those who abuse the system.

    The leading case for this is an account with zero posts or comments, that downvoted more than 8k comments by the bot, 98.5% of all its comments. This is not legitimate voting behavior. This user does have other voting activity that is at least not immediately obviously abusive, but their downvotes on the bot comments are about 65% of their total comment votes since the MBFC bot account was created.

    Following that, I see another user that downvoted the bot about 6.5k times, almost 80% of the bot’s comments, which makes up around 40% of their comment votes since the MBFC bot account was created.

    Interestingly there are also a few cases where people have massively upvoted the comments, which is the case for 3 out of the 13 accounts that have more than 1k total comment votes for the MBFC bot each.

    Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 23% were upvotes, 77% downvotes.
    Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 41% were created by those 13 users with more than 1k votes each.
    Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 51% were created by 28 users with more than 500 votes each.

    I can’t say what a reasonable cutoff might be for gauging vocal minority vs representative user base.

    If I exclude the top 13 voters with more than 1k votes each, this leaves 59.5k votes, which is 28% upvotes and 72% downvotes.
    If I exclude the top 28 voters with more than 500 votes each, this leaves 49.3k votes which is 31% upvotes and 69% downvotes.

    I’ve excluded the bots own automatic votes that Lemmy adds when creating a comment from these calculations.

    I don’t know how people typically vote on bots they like, for me I wouldn’t usually vote on automoderator-style bot posts, it’s not like anyone really gains or loses anything from that anyway.

    Anyway, this is really just some additional data to think about.

    fyi @[email protected] @[email protected]

    edit: typos/missing letters

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
      31·
      1 month ago

      I’m personally trying to stay out of (especially US) politics discussions as much as I can, as I don’t think there’s much to gain there for me anyway while potentially costing a lot of time and energy.

      Without supporting their statements, unless they’re violating instance rules we’re generally trying to allow people to communicate their thoughts here without applying political bias to rule enforcement, at least on instance admin level.

      The issue has nothing to do with their politics, it is that they’re spamming and trolling. Plenty of people have their same politics, and because they don’t make 15 posts a day on basically the exact same unwelcome topic every time, or write publication-length fanfiction about their “enemies” on lemmy.world, it’s not a problem. Are you really not aware of this? I guess if you’re not in the US politics community, you might not be. I’ll do a report to lwreport with some details, if that’s the place to put it.

      I feel you as far as the admin team not wanting to step into the moderation of individual communities, but I also can’t for the life of me understand why the politics moderation team is cool with him. I’m just talking to you about it because it came up, and because it seems nuts that someone can bring such a fountain of hexbear-type negative energy to the place with the full blessing of the mods.

      Like I said, I’ll send details to lwreport.

      The leading case for this is an account with zero posts or comments, that downvoted more than 8k comments by the bot, 98.5% of all its comments. This is not legitimate voting behavior.

      Following that, I see another user that downvoted the bot about 6.5k times, almost 80% of the bot’s comments, which makes up around 40% of their comment votes since the MBFC bot account was created.

      Yes, I think throwing those two out is fair. Below them is someone who just votes a ton, who devoted 14% of their copious voting output to the bot. After that is a major instance admin who decided to give some thousand downvotes. After that is a long string of clearly real users who are giving a long string of hundreds of downvotes. My math puts it at 83% of the votes on my server that there’s no reasonable excuse for throwing out being downvotes, but regardless of the exact number:

      People don’t like the bot.

      Leaving aside one or two probable TOS violations, it still gets a broad majority of downvotes from clearly real accounts. Every conversation about it consists of roughly 90% detailed well-reasoned comments about why it shouldn’t be. No other bot, and very few issues, anywhere on Lemmy attract this kind of hatred and controversy. It doesn’t even really have to be a big deal, it’s just weird that the people who operate the server are so attached to keeping it there.

      I’m going to drop it now, because you’re clearly not interested. Just offering my opinion on things. I also spent some time coding up some improvements to the bot based on feedback the community has been giving to it, after talking with jordanlund and Rooki, so I’m not just talking out of my ass here. I am trying to tell you what the broad majority of the community feels about it, if you want to hear.