Who would do such a thing? And why? The poor little fella is just doing it’s job…
Because it does its job terribly. It provides inaccurate information when it would be faster for any one of us to just do a search for ourselves. And when it can’t figure out a source, it still spams the post, instead of just staying out of it. There has been widespread opposition to the bot existing at all, from day one, and the mods seem to have ignored all of us who say the bot sucks and only gets in the way.
It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes, and we don’t need that crap on Lemmy.
I didn’t like the bots on Reddit, and I don’t like the bots on Lemmy.
It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes
It all just suddenly clicked into place for me.
I think there’s a strong possibility that you’re right. It would explain all the tortured explanations for why the bot is necessary, coupled with the absolute determination to keep it regardless of how much negative feedback it’s getting. Looking at it as a little ad included in every comments section makes the whole thing make sense in a way that, taken at face value, it doesn’t.
I could buy this. Also, the fonts are very jarring and intrusive. I rarely want to view what’s behind the spoiler tag, just give me a line for bias and a line for credibility, no need to be bold and a smaller font if anything, and hide the rest behind the spoiler tag if I’m interested. I already know where MBFC’s bias is, and I can adjust that to get an idea that when they say left, I think center or maybe left-center.
All of that seems pretty reasonable to me, but not if your goal is advertising…
I’m also running under the asumption someones paying for it to be there. Makes no sense otherwise. Literally the start of enshitification. Id urge people to drop instnces that host it as their homes and find a reasonable home instance.
I’ve been getting a lot of ads for Ground News lately in other media that I consume, to the point where it makes me think most of their revenue is going right back into marketing.
I would not be surprised at all if they’ve tossed some money at the mods here for the purpose of boosting their signal even further.
