• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldMtoNews@lemmy.world[META] MBFC bot
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    14 days ago

    I argued against the bot for a week. I hated the damn thing, and I pointed to the negative feedback as evidence in my discussions. I also held off on making sweeping assessments or making any rushed decisions because a vote manipulation ring was simultaneously uncovered, and we had no idea how deep the manipulation went. Could the feedback have been manipulated? No idea! Should we go by votes only? No idea!

    I took the time to let the team read the feedback and discuss the costs and benefits, and in the end the votes were only part of the picture. Another part is the visceral commitment of a vocal minority to overwhelming the community with commentary (and reports) to such an extent that the people who are calm and supportive get drowned out and downvoted, along with anyone who happens to agree with them. Not entirely sure those folks have committed as much energy to downvoting every critical comment as was the case on the other side though.

    The team took 12 days to work through disagreements (there were many) so we could come to a consensus position, and lo and behold, the bot is gone. The fact that the people who want the bot gone feel like they’re being dismissed is flabbergasting to me. It’s gone. Mission accomplished!



  • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldMtoNews@lemmy.world[META] MBFC bot
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    14 days ago

    Yeah, we were told they disrupted a downvote ring. I have no fucking idea where those accounts voted, except that we took vote totals with a grain of salt because we were in the dark. I’m frankly used to being bombarded with downvotes every time i comment in this community (edit: One person went out of their way to downvote each of my last 7 comments, for example.). So in my eyes, votes were (and continue to be) compromised, and we were informed about the ring while we were deliberating bot feedback. I tried to connect the dots with incomplete information because I’m not an admin. What else are you looking for here?


  • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldMtoNews@lemmy.world[META] MBFC bot
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    15 days ago

    Yes, cutting a snippet out of a sentence with broader context is a classic form of bad faith argumentation:

    if we’re not allowed to point to votes as a source of valid information, then sorting by “top” is equally invalid.

    The “if” conditional is pretty fundamental in that sentence. To cut it out and then paraphrase it to mean something it doesn’t is one of the oldest tricks in the book.




  • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldMtoNews@lemmy.world[META] MBFC bot
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    15 days ago
    1. Thank you. I don’t have that kind of audit authority and all we were told is that vote manipulation was occurring. We’d love to have you join the team if you’d like to help.

    2. We took all of the feedback seriously because the bot is gone. I’m really not sure why people keep pretending like we haven’t already acted on it.

    3. That you’d call this “spreading FUD” or"bad faith" is, frankly, insulting. I can only act on the information I have. In the end, I said that manipulation made assessing the situation difficult, but we still followed through accordingly. We are volunteering our time, and you lying about our intentions isn’t helping either.

    I only have a few hours per day to devote to this. If you think you can do better, then step up.




  • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldMtoNews@lemmy.world[META] MBFC bot
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    16 days ago

    Yes, it is personal. The fact that one mod almost resigned over this means that whether or not people intended for it to be, the criticism was in some cases very personal. And we have evidence that some (never said “all”) voting was manipulated, which makes our job more difficult because there’s no way to tell how many of those comments were upvoted because many people agreed with them, versus a few people agreeing with them so intensely that they were willing to break the rules to prove their point. At the end of the day, people gave feedback, we reviewed it, and the bot is gone. We didn’t ask for it to be created, had no role in coding it, didn’t ask for it to be rolled out, didn’t turn it on, couldn’t change it, couldn’t turn it off, and gave the admins time to try their experiment while we determined whether or not it made sense for the community. It wasn’t our bot.