Irregularly Updated Community Feedback: PipedLinkBot Gone Rampant Edition

Previously: Submission Statement Edition

Haven't done these in a while, so let's get started.

Since we haven't really heard any feedback one way or the other, rule 8 is now official. To be fair, we've had a lot less microblog posts than I expected (only one Twitter/X post in the last month even after I waited longer than the initial 1-2 weeks expected, and that was a crosspost.)

Again, the rules are always a work in progress, feel free to give your two cents here whenever you like.

As you guys know, PipedLinkBot went completely insane 2 days ago and looks like it's temporarily shut down. So, I'd like to use this opportunity to explain why I banned the bot pretty much immediately after our community reopened. (And gloat a bit, of course)

Even though I do agree with the principle of using open source, privacy focused frontend instead of using Youtube directly, I have a real problem with using a bot to respond every time somebody posts a Youtube link. It feels like spam, and it doesn't feel like it serves any utility besides pushing an agenda (even though many people here would agree with it). Most people have seen it around here enough to use pipedvideo if they wanted it to use it already.
I think it's always been a rage inducing part of the reddit experience that you see you received a response to your comment, but only have it been a bot smugly correcting your grammar or tell you all your letters are in order or something useless like that. So, for this place, I would like to make sure that everyone you talk to here is a real person as much as possible, because people inspire people to be greater, but bots don't.

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12 comments

I think the bot is fine in principle. The YouTube web site is fucking terrible and it's nice to introduce people who don't use automatic redirects or 3rd party clients to an alternative.

My problem is that it would offer only piped.video links. We don't know how long the piped.video instance will work, but well that's the case for any instance. Ideally a bot would provide at least two links - piped and invidious, and maybe cycle or randomly choose instances. Perhaps under a spoiler tag.

Of course it's up to community mods to choose, but I think bots like this or the tldr bot provide value even if they can cause that "Reddit moment".
- I've seen plenty of people express discontent at the tldr bot around Lemmy. For our community, we never implemented the tldr bot because I think it encourages people to provide their own summary and thoughts in the comments, and also encourages the original poster to take advantage of Lemmy's function of having both a link and a text section by starting the conversation via a submission statement.
  
  I like both the piped bot and the tldr bot for the same reason: I don't need to visit a horribly bloated, ads and scripts ridden web site, which most news sites are. So I take the bot as a really good service. Also consider that without it I'd say most will just read the title and may make conclusions based on that. I'd say that's a bigger advantage than the downsides you mention.
  
  (Yes I use adblocks and stuff. Most news sites are still a drag to visit and difficult to read.)
- Me personally I just use piped.kavin.rocks or smnz.de

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