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MediaBiasFactChecker almost broke the whole system - SLRPNK
slrpnk.netEverything’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. MediaBiasFactChecker@lemmy.world 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.
Wikipedia’s entries note that such outlets aren’t much credible.