Hello everyone ,

There have been concerns raised lately over issues with the Auto tl;dr bot which creates summaries of news articles from several known sites, however only really ABC news is applicable here. Relevant threads:

There are also many other occurrences (I havenā€™t been keeping track), if there are some you would like appended to this list comment with a link below.

Most concerns are that the bot misses important information and/or gives a misleading summary. Iā€™d like to see where people sit on the issue and how we could potentially deal with it. There are a few options I can think of:

  1. Remove the bot (through a ban)
  2. Get @dalekerrigan@aussie.zone to comment a disclaimer underneath all of its comments
  3. Get @dalekerrigan@aussie.zone automatically delete all comments by the bot which have been reported (may open door for abuse)
  4. Do nothing

I donā€™t hate the bot - it can be useful, and I like the concept, however, just like us it gets things wrong.

Anyway feedback is welcome, if you have an opinion on this please comment below so I can judge where we all stand on this and try to make the right decision

5 points

ban. A culture of reading the source must be encouraged

permalink
report
reply
4 points

It has about a 60% usefulness ratio in my opinion but Iā€™d suggest option 2 an auto comment disclaimer that it often leaves relevant stuff out AND to downvote it when the summary isnt useful.

The latter because a) itā€™s a signal to later readers that the summary is misleading and b) if the maintainer is monitoring (prob not) thatā€™s a clue as to which summaries need to be looked at

permalink
report
reply
3 points

Yeh, agree with approach, seems sensible

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

If the bot is taking clicks away from the ABC; thatā€™s not a good thing.

permalink
report
reply
1 point

I like it more than hate it and if itā€™s wrong I just close its comment. Tbh if thereā€™s no pay wall or some kind of soft wall it should be encouraged for people to read the article rather than assume a bot or OP has represented the news issue in an unbiased way.

permalink
report
reply
3 points
*

I like it.

The summaries it provides fall into one of the categories for me:

  • Ignore because Iā€™ve already read the article

  • The summary is interesting enough that Iā€™ll go read the article

  • Ignore, wouldnā€™t have read the article anyway

Overall itā€™s more articles read. Maybe a disclaimer or have it respond to votes or comments of good bot/bad not

ĀÆā \ā _ā (ā ćƒ„ā )ā _ā /ā ĀÆ

permalink
report
reply

Australia

!australia@aussie.zone

Create post

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Topical Megathreads
Before you post:

If youā€™re posting anything related to:

If youā€™re posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone.

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Community stats

  • 1

    Monthly active users

  • 411

    Posts

  • 1.9K

    Comments