As some may have noticed, a fairly large portion of the post on this community are article links posted by bots. I am no moderator and am just a regular user like the rest of you, but I want to know what the community thinks of the posting bots. here is a sample of my opinion to get conversation started:
Pros:
- lots of content to engage with
- people can focus on discussing things not finding thing
Cons:
- lack of reliable quality of article
- lack of diversity of content
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For those who haven’t seen, there is now a poll for whether to keep the content bot active or turn it off: https://lemmy.world/post/1794808
I’d rather not have bots posting outside bot communities. It’s annoying seeing them here.
The only posts bots should be making is mega threads for events. Content posted should be organic from the user to drive discussion and not what some bot wants to repost from Reddit/hn/etc.
I’ve already blocked several bots to improve my experience, since my feed was being overrun by bots posting to various communities.
Bot posts are so annoying, and they are everywhere on Lemmy. RSS bots, repost bots, Reddit clone bots, sporting matches bots. Everything gets reposted 50x already and bots make it all that worse. I disabled bots so I can have peace, but now I won’t get to see the actual useful bots that fix links and such.
Some bots are annoying for sure, but I love the sporting event bots that keep the match information updated in semi-real-time. I don’t see an issue with bots that are identified as such, it’s easy enough to block them (practically a requirement for any news community that has bots posting).
At this point, this community is big enough that we don’t need bots to drive up content anymore.
I prefer quality over quantity, so would be happy without all the bots frankly
Well, lemmy in general needs content. A lot of content is news and having bots post the news is not different from hooking up an rss feed to fill the feed. It’s not the bots that are the problem, it’s motivations of those who program them. Are the bots shilling a service/product/viewpoint?
I welcomed it at first but now im not so sure anymore. Bot posts are prone to flooding my feed and I find it annoying. Perhaps there’s a way to limit the posts
There is a single user who is posting dozens of times a day in my magazine (for which I am a moderator). Another mod on my team has raised the alarm about the user, like surely they’re going through a personal crisis to be so terminally online and posting so frequently.
I’m realizing now they might be a bot. The sources of articles are varied, and quality of article is like 30/70 serious/bullshit. The user occasionally comments on the submissions and I’m realizing the comments are generic rabble rousing instead of being complex language or referencing complex details from the articles shared.
Could anyone speak more to how to identify bot accounts? Many thanks!
[OT]
surely they’re going through a personal crisis to be so terminally online and posting so frequently.
I apparently needed to see this today. Life has been winding me up lately and I have been impatient/quick to dismiss people as a result.
Thanks for snapping me out of it.
I’d like to see something about that as well.
lack of diversity of content
This part is bugging me the most. I often see the same articles posted here over and over again by these bots.
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They make it so I can’t subscribe to this community as they will fill the ever living exultation of my feed. Too many.
But I’m not saying remove them.
Just wanted to let you know incase you are not aware, you can uncheck “show bot accounts” under settings, as long as the bot is marked appropriately you will no longer see bot posts.
We are listening to the input here, and will have a discussion around the topic.
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Yeah it’s a bit of a catch 22.
I’m also a bit bias on the subject, as I run @L4s@lemmy.world here, but will take it down if we feel it’s necessary.
I think it’s fine for now personally, the only recommendations I would make to you and other bot creators are to add a thing to check that a link hasn’t already been posted, and maybe to decrease the frequency a bit.
That’s fair, my bot posts once an hour and checks it’s own previous posts. That is actually something I did not write, but pulled from github.
I wrote something in Python for videos that I can convert to the tech community, that one does check all community posts and won’t repost.
I’m more annoyed they’re intermingled. The small userbase here isn’t posting enough to fill a feed, but the bots do make things weird.
If you’re in a news community, politics, tech space, etc. it can be pretty annoying to have both bots and users posting. Maybe if it was a news community that was only bots or no bots, that would be an improvement.
I think the posting bot is still useful at this point. We are big enough to probably be able to sustain the community on our own but posts would be a lot fewer. Now we have a lot of repeats as the bot just grabs everything but if we relied on someone else in the community to post it for us then we would miss a lot as well. I’m fine either way, just my 2¢
I’m fine with bots adding additional content for the moment. There is always the option to block bots you’re not interested in, or to block all bots in your profile settings.
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