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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards @lemmy.dbzer0.com
Blaze (he/him) @feddit.org

!world@lemmy.world mod states that the MBFC bot is pushed by the instance admins. Instance admin and bot creator denies. Users ask for clarification. Mod ignores.

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:

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43 comments

  • Probably more fitting for !fediverselore@lemmy.ca as the mod didn't actually take any specific mod action. But other than that, from what I see it's either CLM, or coward mod?

    • I decided to post it here in the context of the other threads linked at the end of the post.

      This bot has been under heavy criticism for a few months now, but mods still impose it to the community.

      • Given the tiny percent of subscribed users who are bothered enough to actually block the bot, I don't know if "heavy criticism" is really accurate here. Its more of a (very) vocal minority trying to push their minority view on the vast majority who either like it or don't care. A 1.2% block rate is an amazingly good result for a bot I'd have thought.

        • Subscribed users doesn't seem the best metric to use here compared to active users

          That community has 1800 daily active users. If 288 of them block the bot, that's 16%. Also, the 288 are local users, what about remote users?

          • using Lemmy 0.19.5 logic for counting local active weekly users, which includes all non-bot users that posted, commented or voted in the community, the number is about 3.15k. percentage wise, using the same calculation as in my other comment, the overlap with users that blocked the bot is at around 9.1% with 286 users blocking it. looking at active monthly users, this changes the numbers to about 5.7k active local users with 443 blocking it, which is about 7.7%.

            for remote users these metrics cannot be pulled, as blocks are only visible to the blocking users instance.

            fyi @Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com

            • Thank you for the additional data

            • Interesting. What ranking, out of all users who are blocked, does that 286 put the MBFC bot at? In terms of the most blocked accounts on lemmy.world?

              • 4th place across all blocks by LW users.

                the 3 ahead of it are 2 nsfw posters and a rather active user with political views not shared by most other users. note that 286 is just the overlap of weekly active users in the community that have blocked the account, not the total number of blocks.

                • a rather active user with political views not shared by most other users

                  Hahahahaha. Well put. I've also been vocal about my confusion that not much moderation-wise is being done about that user.

                  If I'm honest, it seems like the moderation team in general is messing up by how unresponsive they're being to the community as a whole, with those two accounts as good examples. I don't think it's a noisy minority. Just look at the votes. Votes aren't everything, but they're a good straw poll for how people feel, and I don't see how you can look at that voting pattern and say it's 1% of the users that don't like the account. It's more than that, it's a wide majority, and then also, some minority of them are willing to be vocal at length about why.

                  I appreciate the response. It's interesting and I'm not trying to put down the work of the admin team by saying these things. I'm just confused by the breakdown in communication and the dogmatic insistence on a certain way of looking at it, that's at odds with way almost all of the community looks at it. That and the lack of communication which is the main thrust of the post here.

                  It's your instance, you can do what you like. I'm just saying my reading of the situation as an amateur observer.

                  • 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 @Blaze@feddit.org @Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com

                    edit: typos/missing letters

                    • 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.

          • I see what your saying, but it's just speculation without hard numbers. Personally I have no skin in the game either way, and the bot doesn't bother me. So for me it's a bit of a non-issue. I was just trying to get a data-based view of how much of a problem is really is. Sure, the data could be sliced and diced differently to paint a different picture. That's the nature of statistics.

            But whatever the result, I still think it's pretty unfair to call out individual mods for not banning the bot. I'd also think twice before banning one of db0s bots. There's a power dynamic at play there. That's my main concern, and I don't think Jordan deserves to be called out in particular given the nature of his comments on this, which speak to a feeling of vulnerability. I have empathy for the guy, that's all. Is it worth all this personal vitriol towards someone just because you guys don't like some default setting in an app that can easily be turned off? Imo it's definitely not a case of power tripping, even if you hate the bot. Peace 🙏.

            • As I stated at the beginning of the post

              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.

              Peace ✌️

    • Seems harsh tbh, if Jordan was the only mod then it would be his sole decision but afaik that's not the situation. There are six mods in that community and presumably they operate on a consensus basis with a decision like this. The bot was obviously implemented by the instance admin. So where's the lie exactly?

      Also people can block that bot if they don't want to see it. Some people are just obsessed with it for some reason. It'd be interesting to know what percent of LW users have blocked it - that'd give a better idea of how unpopular it is or whether it's a vocal minority issue. Any stats on that @MrKaplan@lemmy.world ?

43 comments