I know MediaBiasFactCheck is not a be-all-end-all to truth/bias in media, but I find it to be a useful resource.
It makes sense to downvote it in posts that have great discussion – let the content rise up so people can have discussions with humans, sure.
But sometimes I see it getting downvoted when it’s the only comment there. Which does nothing, unless a reader has rules that automatically hide downvoted comments (but a reader would be able to expand the comment anyways…so really no difference).
What’s the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there’s people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don’t see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck…
“Oh, this new post already has a comment, let’s check it out! … Dang it!”
After the third or fourth time it’s just spammy, and the bot formatting just doesn’t work on connect.
Downvoting doesn’t address this. You can try hiding bots tho.
Downvoting definitely makes your opinion on it known though. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here reading all this.
I don’t think it does. People are explaining all kinds of different reasons why they downvote the bot, so there’s no cohesive reason why it gets downvoted.
In fact, a fair number of people don’t even seem to understand what the bot actually does…lol
I think that’s exactly what it does. It doesn’t matter why they don’t like having it around. They don’t like having it around. And that feedback is important.
I down vote it and like it. I just like it as the kast comment. I’m doing my part!
People downvote it as a placement strategy.
People downvote it not because it makes bad comments, but because they don’t realize they could block a bot.
You downvote a comment because you don’t like what that user said, not because you never want to see any of their comment ever again.
Some people downvote it because they know how Lemmy works and want to find MBFCbot at the bottom of a post’s comments. Other people downvote it because they don’t get how Lemmy works and don’t realize they could block it.
…and yet both of them often leave the MBFCbot as the top comment, lol
That’s pretty much my gripe. One time I saw a post with maybe six, seven comments, opened it up, and they were all either the bot, or replies to the bot.
And even if you block the bot the post still shows up as having comments. So you’ll open up a post boasting the aforementioned six or seven comments expecting to find a lively debate, or at least a wisecrack about global affairs, and leave with a bunch of tumbleweeds and the lingering knowledge that somewhere, two or more people are arguing with a machine about whether or not it thinks the newspaper is any good.
It would be nice if bot comments weren’t counted, at least as an option.
I’d love that
That fault lies with the Connect dev though… the formatting used on the webUI works as intended.
Probably, still remains that out of all the bots I’ve seen this is the only one with format issues. I believe a minimalist approach to be preferable for bots since their goal is spreading information over a large userbase with various client, from CLI to native web page.