2y ago

So... about the bots

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

38 comments

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).

I prefer quality over quantity, so would be happy without all the bots frankly

At this point, this community is big enough that we don't need bots to drive up content anymore.

It seems the same things keep being posted multiple times, usually by bots. I have blocked bots, but they still show. It's gotten to the point I've had to start blocking them, and users the post the same things that have already been posted here multiple times.
Get rid of them I say.
- Noticed this as well, I keep seeing the same topics and articles posted 4-6 times within a day or so. Getting annoying.

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?
- But you wouldn't hook up an RSS feed into lemmy, you would use the feed directly.
  The interesting part is the user interaction, if it's just a torrent of bot posts no user is interested in engaging.
  
  I couldn't agree more with the last sentence. I would much rather have less content but knowing that everything I see some human in the other end found it worthwhile posting.
- it's the amount of comments on bot posts that is the problem. I go to news communities on lemmy/reddit too see articles and people's reactions to those articles. If I just wanted to read news, I would go to my news aggregator, not Lemmy.

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.

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

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.

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¢

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.
  
  .

I come to the fediverse for a bit of interaction with humans, or at least observe a bit of discourse 😅 I just unsubbed from another community because it was non-stop bot links. I have RSS for that, don't need it in my lemmy feed too.

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’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.

I personally think having bot-posted content is better than an empty community.

usually they stay in their own instances/communities, so they can be good to cross post from, or just copy their links
otherwise they're easy to hide/ban

As a (hopefully good citizen) bot maintainer, the best advice I can give is to not follow active or new. Hot and top should not show bot posts unless they are being upvoted.
- but I want to follow new. It's how I find niche communities here, and because there was a lot of botting on a community, I had to block the entire community.
  I come to lemmy because I want to interact with humans. If I wanted to read random articles, I'll go to my bookmarked blogs.
  
  I can't speak for the posting bots, but game day bots are pretty fundamental to sports communities - like, we have no shot at attracting any interest to our community if there aren't game day bots. We're literally running the same code as the reddit bots, just using the lemmy API. So that same traffic exists on Reddit, it is just that there is so much other traffic that they aren't as prominent.

38 comments