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…
Some people are pissed that the format is spammy? That’s the complaint I’ve heard.
I’d certainly prefer something like post tagging/labels but within the current feature set of lemmy I think it’s about as good as it could be.
That’s my gripe with it. Its single comment fills the entire screen of my phone when scrolling past and it uses gigantic font, a big separator line (?), and links mixed with text mixed with more links.
Additionally, it fucks with the “new comment” and “hot” sorting, depending on how active Lemmy is at the time, by spamming post after post with a comment even though there is no actual discussion happening.
You should use a client that supports all of the text formatting. On Voyager the bot’s comment is smaller than most when collapsed (which it is by default).
Yeah, I’m not changing my entire client that I’ve gotten used to just to deal with a single bot that annoys me.
You can’t block it?
Yes we can. It’s in my blocked users, like any others (using Sync app). I’ve blocked it mostly because the formatting is lazy and word count excessive. It just “gets in the way”. Plus I generally already know the bias of most reputable sources, as do most news junkies.
And because it uses spoilers, when I click it to collapse the comment, it just expands
What client do you use? It looks fine in Thunder. (I agree it’s spammy in general, but not because of the formatting.)
I’m using Sync and this is how it looks:
Like I commented above, I wonder if other spoiler tags work in Sync or if there’s something about the way this bot posts that breaks it.
It’s broken on Eternity as well, it looks like this
I wonder if other spoiler tags work in Eternity or if there’s something about the way this bot posts that breaks it.
Looking at the buttons that they give me when I’m commenting it looks like it does support spoilers when done in the >!text!< syntax, but the other alternative version definitely took over.
I’ve never seen the ::: spoiler text ::: version work
That’s partly Lemmy’s fault for using a custom spoiler syntax. But yeah it sounds like Eternity doesn’t support it yet.
That said, there was an issue in their repo just recently closed, so it sounds like support is coming!
https://codeberg.org/Bazsalanszky/Eternity/issues/172
That’s great to hear, I love eternity as a client because none of the other ones that I’ve tried so far have come close to what I’m looking for in a UI and I like the ability to block comments and posts by specific keywords, it really helps when the entire platform as a whole becomes hyper focused on one subject because I can just add that subject to the block list and filter out the flood