Discussion on Concerns over Auto tl;dr bot - eviltoast

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 haven’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. I’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 don’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

  • spudsrus@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    I like it.

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

    • Ignore because I’ve already read the article

    • The summary is interesting enough that I’ll go read the article

    • Ignore, wouldn’t have read the article anyway

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

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