That's partially the reason for making my AutoTL;DR bot.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Technology
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I’ve seen a few bot-tldrs and while I really appreciate the idea, I’m not sure if they achieve that 100%. The summary is often a bit long (sometimes just as long as the article) and as I understand it the one I see most often is grabbing sentences and stitching them together, which is nice since it keeps the actual content, but it can be a bit awkward to read.
Maybe yours is working differently, I think generally speaking it’d be best to have one paragraph summarizing the article (chatGPT-style), or having a tool that creates new headlines based on the content and replaces the actual headline itself.
Even with the perfect summary, there’s still the issue that people have to look at the comments to see it. I‘d imagine most people just scroll past the post itself.
I think it's the one you see the most, that stitches sentences together. Using AI for this is very unwise, eventually it's gonna make something up and it's gonna straight up lie.
In my opinion the bot does a better job than most actual people would do when summarizing. It's not perfect and it will never be, but I'm quite ok with how it works.
It’s definitely worth having that bot and I think it’s great that you’re putting the work in. It just doesn’t fix all the "misleading headlines" issues if people don’t even look at the comments or don’t read the (not super short) summary.
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There’s just way too many articles being posted where at best the headline only implies something that isn’t actually true and at worst just plainly lies.
The funny thing is, even the article itself is often already correcting the headline, but I can’t imagine that more than 10% are actually reading every one, which means there’s a constant stream of misinformation being broadcasted. Not every one of these has high stakes, but still.
Here’s two examples that I just came across:
- Signal Denies Existence of Zero-Day Vulnerability on the App | Post. In the article: Someone posted unfounded claims about a vulnerability, Signal investigated but didn’t find anything, the person apologized and took the tweet down.
- Goldman Sachs exec reportedly said Apple Card savings account was a ****ing mistake | Post. In the article: "Mistake" isn't even part of the quote. A person is saying this before it started and that person may not have even been involved in the project after.
And because people are only reading the title, they upvote and move on. Even though the comments set it straight as well. There’s a lot more that I’ve come across. It’s infuriating.
The solution here is actual moderation on news communities, but unfortunately it feels as though 90% of Lemmy subs aren't actively moderated or the mods don't give a shit. So many of them have no rules and no mod presence.
Hi - Beehaw mod here - we very much give a shit. We try to stay on top of things as much as we can, but we're all volunteers with lots of other things going on, and !Technology is our most active community. If you see something that you feel needs attention, please report it with an explanation in the report reason so that we can take a look at it. We don't always take action, but we always look at and evaluate user reports.
What if users find the article itself to be misinformative, is that something moderators will look at if reported with evidence?
I can pretty much guarantee that on beehaw at least, at least one mod will look at any report. As far as what the mod action would be, I think it would depend on the situation. For misinformation that is deceptive and harmful in some way, we have and likely would continue to remove it. For something that is not intending to be deceptive and/or isn't actively harmful, I think I would be more inclined to leave it up and leave it to the community to hash out in the comments. For example, I'd be likely to remove disinfo about Covid vaccines or conspiracy theories about 5g or something, but I probably wouldn't remove a post just because somebody called Linux an OS instead of "GNU plus Linux" or something. But that's just how I would tend to treat this sort of thing. For most mod actions that aren't straightforward, we tend to try and discuss them and get multiple perspectives.
Wanna play media bias bingo?
From https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-media-bias
I see a little...
- Spin
- Unsubstantiated Claims
- Sensationalism
- Slant
- Omission of Source Attribution
- Bias by Story Choice and Placement
- Subjective Qualifying Adjectives
- Word Choice
Ok, some of those are a stretch...
Either way, the editors are probably happy, they are clickbaity headlines.
I feel like there was a big push for quantity of content on Lemmy, so everyone set up bots to push content to Lemmy and now we're stuck with a bunch of shitty content on Lemmy lol.
The posts I’ve come across didn’t seem like bot posts
We really should moderate the titles more. I just realized that every article I ignored I basically accepted as truth. Or, at least, my brain accepted as truth in the background. I'll see the same lie twice a day everyday and start processing as fact.
Hi, if you see any examples of this, please report them. I can't promise that we'll always take action, but we do try to. The mods here are all volunteers and don't always have the ability to pick up on this type of thing - we rely on reports to draw our attention to things that might need action on our part.
Another difficulty is that Lemmy offers a very limited set of tools when it comes to something like this. I can't tag or flair an article as having a deceptive headline - there's no tag/flair feature. Mods can't edit post titles, and we can't even sticky a comment within a post; only posts can be stickied. Our only tools are commenting or messaging the OP asking them to change the title (and if it's a federated post there no guarantee that the edit would federate in a reasonable amount of time, if ever) or remove the post. Often when we get reports there is already a good discussion in the comments about why the headline is bad, and personally I am always reluctant to remove posts that have good, ongoing discussion in them (as long as no one is being harmed anyway).
In the end of the day I agree that we should moderate titles more. I think we ought to moderate a few things more closely. But Beehaw's mods are just normal users who, in their spare time, do their best to try and keep things nice. In particular, !Technology is our largest and most active community, and it is essentially impossible for us to stay on top of every post and evaluate it for accuracy, even if we might like to.
Sorry for the early morning ramble. I'm not disagreeing at all with your comment, just trying to give some perspective on why it might be a bigger ask than you realize.
Didn’t know the moderation tools were that limited. Hopefully that’s being worked on.
Mod tools weren't a priority the last time we heard anything from the Lemmy devs about it. It's possible that has changed since then but I doubt it.
We have had a few people from beehaw working on contributing some things, but from what I have gathered (as someone who isn't a software engineer) the lemmy codebase is very difficult to work with.
I understand the sentiment. By saying we, I meant myself and the other users. We should take more responsibility for what we share. Maybe we can try to make that part of the culture. The title should be the information we personally want to spread or call to attention.
I hate headlines. They’re written on purpose to piss me off and sometimes they work. Maybe I should stop reading headlines and just read the articles instead. Probably healthier than the other way around.
How would you identify and decide which articles to read?
I’d pick a reasonable source, then I’d go with a mix of pure chance and good old fashioned skimming.
By stopping reading headlines and just read the articles instead.
Just read every article?
(I can see your take. I'm not making fun of you, but) I can imagine this being a reason why Twitter got rid of titles for articles in tweets.
A lot of news sites seem to change the articles and headlines as the events go on, meaning you can post one title, and go back later to find a completely different take on it.
A/B tests I saw a few times where a refresh would suddenly change the title of an article
No. There are studies about that, see e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/misinformation-desk/202212/study-few-people-read-what-they-share for a more recent one. That's also why Facebook, Twitter & Co at various times implemented various features trying to push you reading the stuff you post.
On Lemmy people don’t really share, but they might upvote stuff as long as the headline supports their personal biases, so I guess that’s reasonably similar to what’s going on in Facebook and Xitter.
Old habits die hard from reddit of coming for the comments than the article.
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I try not to editorialize headlines too much when I post, which means if the headline is clickbait it stays, even if the article content that talks about something else. Depending on how egregious I'll add something to the body or append it to the title.
Please, summarize the article instead of regurgitating their bad titles - or even better don't post links from sources that use bad clickbaity titles.
We don't have to let Lemmy devolve into Facebook/Twitter/reddit/...
To give you an example, I posted about "ROCKSMITH 2014 LEAVING STORES" and linked to the Ubisoft article about it. They had the title all capitalized, not me, so I just added "- Ubisoft" at the end to show it was the official announcement.
I wrote at length in the body about what that means for Steam, Ubisoft's plan for Rocksmith subscription service, what people might need to access Custom DLC before it stops being sold, to drive discussion on several related topics to this announcement.
Yeah I’m with you on that one. I often feel like I might get it wrong and it’s generally best to keep the original. More often than not the answer is probably to just not post the article at all, if the headline is misleading and the actual news is far from newsworthy.
The unfortunate reality of headlines is that, frequently, the author of the article has little or no control over them. Generally an editor will be writing a headline for maximum punch and clickability, and very frequently you will find articles with deceptive or clickbait-y headlines where the article is much better quality.
Yep. Happens way too often.
This is the kind of thing where moderators need to put in a lot of active work to enforce some level of content and behavior standards or it'll simply collapse to the basic state of human laziness like most online communities.
There's not exactly anything wrong with that - it's perfectly normal - but people will always default to doing this kind of thing unless there's active effort to prevent it, and I haven't really seen any Fediverse communities interested in doing that work yet (which I wouldn't blame them for; it's nontrivial)
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From the Beehaw sidebar: "We do want you coming here and sharing links to news articles, websites you find, starting discussions, connecting with others, and in general doing what you see on other social media websites."
What if the focus of Beehaw and/or Lemmy in general is not as a link aggregation platform but instead a community of topic discussion? People are rewarded for posting links to articles with upvotes which only gives incentive to continue posting the same not-read content that they think the respective subs will like (upvote).
Instead, we should be rewarding people who are actively engaging with the community. Not broadcast posting the way it goes on mastodon or IG, etc., but actual back and forth interaction with the community.
Maybe take away the ability to upvote a link post and reserve that for the actual discussion parts that take place?
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This is built in into Lemmy, you don't need to look at votes to decide to participate.
While submitting a link can be a way to start a conversation, you don't need to. Just write whatever you want, and click post.
Actually, why did OP put a meme image in this post? Want to ask something, then ask it. The place is what we make of it.
What if the focus of Beehaw and/or Lemmy in general is not as a link aggregation platform but instead a community of topic discussion? People are rewarded for posting links to articles with upvotes which only gives incentive to continue posting the same not-read content that they think the respective subs will like (upvote).
I think that clickbait titles are effective because they trigger an emotional response. We have more or less same brains with same biases and heuristics as users on other platforms. So I don't think that this system can work, people will continue posting and upvoting such content. Fast and strict content moderation, however, could be effective.
Maybe take away the ability to upvote a link post and reserve that for the actual discussion parts that take place?
this would probably cause its own problems as a design choice, but it's also not even possible with Lemmy without changing the underlying code (which is a whole ordeal) so that's not really on the table.
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The issue is the way that news is consumed these days. You always used to have a catchy newspaper headline with a title to get you to buy it (extra extra read all about it insert catchy alliteration here) . People dont consume news. They dont read articles. They receive headlines and then immediately engage on some other website that profits off sharing this content.
Clickbate for all the woes exists because it works and people do click it. Or are more likely to click and share than if it was a dull informative headline. It's the same as on youtube. As long as the actual meat of the article is fine and the headline isnt too much of a BS article it doesnt bother me too much but of course there are limits to that.
There’s a difference between clickbait and misleading though. It probably often overlaps, but headlines can be clickbait without being misleading: "Doctors hate this one trick" isn’t really giving you wrong information. "Signal Denies Existence of Zero-Day Vulnerability on the App", however, strongly implies that Signal has a security flaw that it stubbornly refuses to fix, which harms the reputation of the App and isn’t at all true if you read the actual article.
That’s the main issue I’m having with these headlines. They‘re not just annoying, they’re spreading misinformation.
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