Everything’s been working smoothly, with nothing to report about the moderation bot. The community has been quiet but productive, which was precisely the goal, and the bot working smoothly with no issues. However, something almost went wrong in a particular entertaining fashion which I thought I would share.
The algorithm for classifying troll users doesn’t have any polarity. It only knows which users are opposed to which other users. 50% of the time, it’ll get its whole ranking system backwards, so the troll users are the normal ones, and everyone else gets negative rank, because the math works just as well under that ranking regime. Generally this isn’t a problem, because there’s a step:
# Flip the sign if we arrived at a majority-negative ranking, which can happen
if -min_val > max_val:
rank[1:] *= -1
The most popular user is always more popular than the least popular troll is unpopular, by quite a big margin, so that works fine.
However. Things have changed. MediaBiasFactChecker@lemmy.world is so unpopular that it’s almost (1% margin) more unpopular than the highest-rank user is popular. If that had happened, the whole polarity would have flipped, every user would have been banned, all the trolls would have been unbanned. Mass hysteria. I only happened to notice it before it happened and stop the bot. It’s on track to be the least popular user on Lemmy, with about 5 times lower rank than some of the most notorious trolls.
Have fun with this information. I started checking the median rank of all users, instead. Thanks MediaBiasFactChecker.
As an outspoken critic of the MediaBiasFactChecker bot and the place of authority it gives to the deeply flawed site MediaBiasFactCheck.com, I find this hilarious.
MediaBiasFactChecker@lemmy.world is so unpopular that it’s almost (1% margin) more unpopular than the highest-rank user is popular.
Thank you for sharing this statistic! I’m excited that my downvotes may have contributed to this record-breaking achievement.
Everyone played their part, I’m sure.
And yes, it’s funny as hell. That’s why I wanted to spread the word!
Why is the media bias bot so disliked?
The message formatting looks shit on a lot of lemmy clients
The source of the data is also pretty biased in general and does objectively malicious ratings like drawing a factuality equivalency between fairly trustworthy news outlets like The Guardian and the fucking far right conspiracy outlet, Breitbart.
The owner of the bot ignores this feedback and continues to spam every thread with it.
I’ve blocked it
The guy who maintains the database it pulls from has questionable bias himself, it’s not unbiased itself like it implies.
But supposedly the guy’s bias leans left sooo I personally have been fairly neutral towards it
The guy leans right, and leans Zionist.
Crisis averted 😅
But yeah, the mbfc bot is annoying, I have blocked it as well.
