• Cris
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    5 days ago

    If you want to potentially sidestep some of people’s frustrations you might consider just using the credibility rating and focusing on whether a group provides factual reporting, rather than left or right of center

    You can also create a user experience that more carefully manages expectations of the feature by having it be opt in, but presenting the option to users when it becomes available. That gives you the opportunity to give a short blurb acknowledging its imperfections and also highlighting its potential value

    As someone fairly to the left wing myself, the fact that lemmy is so left wing is both a blessing and a curse. I don’t see Nazis around, but being in an echo chamber isn’t great for your ability to engage with perspectives other than your own, and makes you succeptible to narratives that reinforce your existing views regardless of whether they’re accurate

    I’d love this feature, in spite of its flaws, but it does definitely have them. Its based on the US overton window, which will frustrate folks from other parts of the world who may already feel lemmy sometimes forgets the world beyond the US exists. And the US overton window is changing as a product of the trump administration which may warp mbfc results, which could honestly be really dangerous.

    Focussing on the factuality and credibility might help you sidestep those problems and make a feature people would find less frustrating, potentially even to the point that you could make it opt out.

    Generally I appreciate efforts to build healthier, less echo chambery discourse, thanks for the work you’re doing ❤️

    • idunnololzM
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      35 days ago

      Hmm I double checked how trustworthy their factualness ratings are and it seems ok and generally not controversial.

      On the other hand it looks like they are insanely restrictive about their API, requesting a $10/month fee and only giving a API limit of 50 requests/month. There are a few scrapers that I’ve found but it looks like if I wanted to add this feature realistically I would need to (1) use a scraper to compile all their data into a database (2) host the database myself and (3) create my own API against this database. This is a lot of maintenance work, the biggest by far is maintaining the scraper. It’s also a bit concerning how legit this would be since I’d imagine they would not be happy if they found out I was essentially scraping all their data and serving it myself.

      Due to all of this I don’t think I will add this feature unless I found a better way to access their data that wasn’t as sketchy.

      • Cris
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        25 days ago

        Gotcha. Is the api different for the overall rating? I wonder how the bot and the other app are doing it

        • idunnololzM
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          5 days ago

          I’m guessing all of them scraped the website and they are all using the data they scraped. I’ve done a lot of projects like this before. The first couple of years its easy. But it can get annoying over time because the website can change, they can add anti-scraping measures, etc and it becomes a whole cat and mouse game. I’ve been forced to just remove features in the past because I didn’t want to play that game anymore and it has always sucked.