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. [email protected] 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.
For a deep dive, you can read the original post when it was unveiled for [email protected] last month, or the feedback post when they expanded it to !news and !world despite its terrible reception.
I’ve made a number of comments about the flaws in their approach. If there’s interest I might make a link collection. TLDR: MBFC is a joke, nobody in the fact-checking world or experience managing source credibility takes it seriously. The author/editor of the site has a right-wing, anti-Palestinian, and anti-LGBTQ+ bias.
Why do you think it’s a joke? Just looking at the wikipedia article on it, it sounds like it is widely used and correlates strongly with other independent fact checkers. Also, while it was founded by one person, it uses a network of independent reviewers.
Most of the people criticizing it seem to not like how their source is rated, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.