auk

Reasonable. I wasn't trying to jump down your throat about it. I was a little annoyed at the comments which are positing some sort of fantasy scenario where the bot is useful, but where people hate it for irrational reasons. But yours was a reasonable question, definitely, in particular because for at least one account, it looks like what you described is exactly what's happening.

Big if true.

They have not. I just did some analysis of it, and there is one person whose account has downvoted almost every comment that the bot has left. They have around a thousand other votes, so it's unlikely to be a single-issue votebot account, but they also have no posts or comments, which is suspect. It seems plausible that there's something mechanical going on which might be concerning. On the other hand, it's only one person. There is one other person who has given so many downvotes to the bot that it's suspicious, also.

Aside from those two accounts, it all looks like real downvotes. There are accounts which have given hundreds of downvotes to the bot, but they're all recognizable as highly active real accounts, so it makes sense that they would give mass downvotes to the bot.

People just don't like the bot. Have you considered listening to the pretty extensive explanations they've given in this comments section as to why?

I'm saying that the bot is incorrect. Look up any pro-Palestinian or -Arab source on it, and you'll find a pretty bald-faced statement that it is factually suspect, because its viewpoint is anti-Israel. Look up the New York Times, which regularly reports factually untrue things, including one which caused a major journalistic scandal near the beginning of the war in Gaza, and check its factual rating.

Every report of bias is from somebody's point of view. That part I have no issue with. Pretending that a source is or isn't factual depending on whether it matches your particular bias is something different entirely.

Can you give an example of someone who ever posted something disingenuous that MediaBiasFactCheck got in the way of?

It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes

It all just suddenly clicked into place for me.

I think there's a strong possibility that you're right. It would explain all the tortured explanations for why the bot is necessary, coupled with the absolute determination to keep it regardless of how much negative feedback it's getting. Looking at it as a little ad included in every comments section makes the whole thing make sense in a way that, taken at face value, it doesn't.

Most people don't want the bot to be there, because they don't agree with its opinion about what is "biased." It claims factually solid sources are non-factual if they don't agree with the author's biases, and it overlooks significant editing of the truth in sources that agree with the author's biases.

In addition, one level up the meta, opposition to the bot has become a fashionable way to rebel against the moderation, which is always a crowd pleaser. The fact that the politics moderators keep condescendingly explaining that they're just looking out for the best interests of the community, and the bot is obviously a good thing and the majority of the community that doesn't want it is getting their pretty little heads confused about things, instigates a lot of people to smash the downvote button reflexively whenever they see its posts.

I played around with possibilities for a while, and did some more fixing and tweaking of the algorithm and visualization tools. Here's one way I think it could work. Once a week, the bot could post a breakdown of three random users who are permitted to post, and three random users who aren't permitted to post. Right now, that breakdown would be:

Permitted to post:

Not permitted to post:

That means that anyone who wants to can check up on how it's making its decisions. Then, in addition, anyone who wants an explanation for their user, I can do that.

Those charts are anonymized. I'll send the users in question to some of the admins to see what they think. I think it's okay to post a few users, as long as it's random and not repetitive. I don't think it would come across as singling anyone out or making them uncomfortable, but I'm curious what other people think.

There's not a cap. That type of activity is, in fact, a classical failure mode of this type of network. Just like people learned to build link farms to artificially give page rank to fake pages, people can learn to farm for zeitgeist points to then give or take away rank from some targeted user. That is one reason I'm being cagey about giving away introspection tools or detailed road maps of people's points. I don't want to facilitate someone getting feedback about how well an effort like that is working.

I'm a little more concerned about people accumulating points and then upvoting a troll account to make sure it doesn't get banned, than I am about people downvote-bombing someone they disagree with to ban them. They are both concerns, though. There are ways around both through tweaks to the algorithm, but I've constantly been surprised about how the tools work out in practice as compared to my theory about them, and so I'm waiting until it happens before I start messing with solutions to it. I do have some ideas in mind for how to deal with it. I am guessing that in the long run, it won't be too big an issue, but I want to see how it works out in practice before actualizing the countermeasures I was thinking of.

What about this?

I see what you're saying. The line graph feels kind of paternalistic. It's saying that if you disagree with the herd, you're going to lose your value. I think the spectral timeline with a legend may be better, at least for a frequent posting and followup use case.

The line graph is clearly better suited for discussing how the system functions though. For example, it appears a new member won’t get banned for a few negative interactions early in their career, as the cutoff is below zero.

Yes. We give some leeway so that someone doesn't get penalized for a single random downvote early in their career, but we still need to be reactive enough that if someone makes a new account and posts a garbage comment, we jump on it. I have a process that's meant to deal with that, but it's tricky. I'm still working it out, and I rolled it out a little bit early so that it's now jumping the gun and deleting some comments from people who really shouldn't have their comments deleted.

It's tough because it's hard to test in the abstract, and by definition, the people who don't comment a lot don't leave too many comments to be able to use as test cases. What I'm planning to do is work on it a little bit more, testing in production, and once it's worked out, I'll make a post explaining it all.

This comment was deleted, but it shouldn't have been. The code to aggressively delete comments from users who don't have enough data to rank them, meaning potentially throwaway accounts, was malfunctioning, and deleted everything from any accounts without recent activity. It's only supposed to trigger if that user has some downvotes, but it was deleting anything.

I've fixed the code and restored the comment.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony involved. To answer your point, I picked a terrible name for this community. People are not required to upvote you or agree with you, or even be nice to you. It's meant as a place without toxic low-effort trolling, but certainly people are allowed to hit the downvote button to quickly express disapproval in addition to giving some more well-considered reasons for disagreeing with the stated argument.

What I was going for, unsuccessfully, by saying "pleasant" was that this person can say something like this viewpoint, and other people can disagree with them, but it doesn't turn into a dumpster fire of personal insults, changes of subject, and wild accusations. At that, I think it's succeeding, looking at this thread. People are not agreeing but it's a lot calmer than an equivalent thread in a lot of Lemmy's politics communities would be.

This comment was deleted, but it shouldn't have been. The code to aggressively delete comments from users who don't have enough data to rank them, meaning potentially throwaway accounts, was malfunctioning, and deleted everything from any accounts without recent activity. It's only supposed to trigger if that user has some downvotes, but it was deleting anything.

I've fixed the code and restored the comment.