As the service grows, I have noticed more and more people and bots popping up, only posting links to a news article and that’s that. Usually there is no post, no summary and nothing from the OP but the link.
What do you all think about this?
Do you think it’s a good thing, because it is providing content? Do you maybe find it annyoing and if so, why?
I myself am happy when people take the time out of their say to try to provide content, but for me it’s a bit low effort a lot of the times. Bots I tend to block immediately and people it they make it hard for me to reader other posts between all their link-posting.
But I am more curious how you all think about this and whether you consider it good or bad.
I absolutely dislike “repost bots”. I prefer communication with real people.
That’s just what a bot would say
I guess we all do, but as of now, we have to choose between lack of content or some bot content
I suppose it depends on how you define content. Usually when people post it includes some discussion. Those types of posts get drowned in the bot posts however.
Usually when people post it includes some discussion.
Indeed, but as of now, I feel we are lacking a bit of a userbase to have enough content at all times. I know the part about everyone posting as much as they can, but I guess we still need bots for a bit
I still don’t understand how having more content from bots improves the site or why we “need” them.
I block most bots on sight, and it’s actually improved my experience.
We don’t need bots. It’s concerning some people think any community /needs/ bots. That type of infinite growth mentality is wack and I don’t subscribe to it. Like you, I block almost every bot I come across and my experience only continues to improve.
I can see why some would like them. There are a lot of lurkers who just look at the content and move on without any discussion and that’s ok. For them I suppose it doesn’t matter if its a person or bot if the content is good. Doesn’t mean it’s good for the platform but if it’s kept to a limit and isn’t posting trash I not too concerned. That said those bots or people the post mentioned certainty are annoying.
Exactly, especially for small communities where the community relies or one or two posters
Lemmy, like Reddit, operates like a link aggregator, so news article spam sorted by type into sublemmy’s is sort of its “natural state”. IMO there’s not really anything wrong with it, because it’s a good way to get conversations started.
I don’t really like the lemmit.online bot that just reposts “archive” posts from Reddit.
This is just another reminder that reddit didn’t start its life with comments. Reddit was just the links at first, comments came later, and yes, the first comment was complaining about there being comments and how the site would be ruined.
I don’t really like the lemmit.online bot that just reposts “archive” posts from Reddit.
Yeah, that was just depressing - we’ve moved on and it felt like it was trying to drag us back again.
My main issue is title formatting. I don’t dislike the TIL bot, but I do dislike the long title being cut off in my app.
As long as they mark the accounts as a bot account it doesn’t bother me, if it gets too much I can just turn on the don’t show bot accounts check.
I used to run a news bot on my profile for my community, but some people PM’d me to mark my profile as bot. I also personally use my account so I don’t want my other post/comments to be seen as bot activity; and my instance did not permit creation of a second account for the bot only, what should I do to keep the bot running without having my profile marked as bot?
Imo we need to be able to differentiate between bot posts and comments. Posts can often be spamy, but comments are almost always useful.
As long as it’s not “spammy” and there’s actual engagement or discussion on the posts I don’t see an issue. But if the community being posted to isn’t engaging with the posts, or it’s crowding out the more interesting posts, yeah that’s not great and shouldn’t be allowed.
I am a human who posts a lot of news. It’s not mainstream news though and it’s all been read and selected by me.
Most of it is to a small niche news sub and gets little engagement yet - the 90-9-1 rule applies and we don’t have the numbers yet.
If anyone discusses it with me I’m over the moon!
I feel like it will be increasingly used for propaganda, not discussion. By cherry picking articles, these news accounts will try to shape public opinion.
Whether or not it’s posted by a bot, real users are the one commenting and voting on it. It’s not going to be useful for spreading propaganda unless it’s something the user base already believes
I doubt they’ll be turned off, it’s just hopefully we get enough real users to drown them out
Hate it. If it’s a person fine, I guess, but I wish bots weren’t allowed to create posts at all. I would rather see Lemmy grow very slowly than see Lemmy become a mirror of Reddit, with shit tons of scraped posts that have little to no engagement on them. That’s not a community, it’s a newspaper. I don’t understand the “massive growth at any cost” mindset.
Counterpoint, I’m trying to find a good bot to be a matchbot for a community I made. It’s more effort than I have time to devote to posting a Pre-Match, Match, and Post-Match thread to the community with lineups, match events, and game summary. I wish a bot could take care of that so I could simply comment on the game in each thread.
You won’t believe what THIS Lemmy user said in the comments! 😱
I don’t mind the news, I absolutely hate the bots.
I said in another comment before, there’s an “AITA” bot reposting everything from Reddit, but, who are we supposed to answer if it’s a bot that’s asking? It doesn’t make any sense…
If there is no engagement (or at least something that’s educational or informational), then what’s the point?
If it was a “TIL” bot I’d probably have a harder time hating on it, but still.
…there’s an “AITA” bot
That’s ridiculous. Wonder if there’s a r/roastme bot somewhere.
Hopefully a lot of the bots are a stop-gap measure while the user base develops.
There’s a voting system. That should give you an idea of whether they’re considered good or bad and of their visibility in general.
Not if there are more bots than humans upvoting and drowning out the real people.
News articles are fine, but I’m not as thrilled with the Reddit reposting bots.
I get news from the fediverse so I’m very happy with others posting news.
I don’t like repost bots though because they tend to be programmed to let non-fedizens control the agenda. Eg scraping what the people of Reddit upvoted.
My problem with it’s poor quality sources and/or content. For example: yellow journalism. I want to be informed and have good discussions, not being outraged or click baited.
I hate it. Some communities just fill up my feed with links to news articles with zero (or zero quality) comments. I either unsubscribe from these communities, or block the poster. In some cases they are so frequent, and with images that are effectively advertising. That and the zero comments, they just remind me of Reddit ads. I don’t think you can hope to build a community by drowning out any discussion with a flood of posts from news sites. If you’re the mod of a community with so little interaction, then you should be curating content and adding comments yourself.
I used to get most of my news from Reddit, now that I don’t use Reddit I get them from here. I post pretty frequently news articles on my country’s community and think that they are a good source for a discussion.
I am also replacing reddit for news. I currently find it a bit tedious to see the same post on 2 or 3 different sites, however, there are not too many subscribers so I go with it.
I have noticed more interactions with some of the bot posts. If I see at least one comment I check it out and have started engaging that way.
Everything has to find the right rhythm. This takes time (and sometimes duplicate posts).
For sure, duplicate posts are annoying but that’s the nature of the fediverse, I think some apps are trying to combat this but it would take time. Overall I’m pretty happy with my new home here!
I am also. I find myself looking for answers here more and more.
It really annoys me, especially as there seems to be at least two lemmy instances that are 99% just a bot reposting everything from reddit… Really wish I could block whole instances
On kbin you can
Block the individual bots. You’ll get rid of them in one go.
Oh thank you! I couldn’t figure out how to do it in the app I use (Liftoff) but with your comment I checked again and found out how!
This makes “All” so much better to explore, thank you!
you can’t do that on lemmy? TIL
