Low Effort Bot Content
Low Effort Bot Content
Ok, so I get that there are two views on the success of Lemmy. 1, more content = more views = more users signing up. 2, Quality content = more views = more users signing up.
I'm firmly in the #2 category myself but I understand the viewpoint of #1 even if I dont agree with it. For some people #1 might cause them to sign up...
But I dont see how low effort bots creating useless content for content sake is beneficial to this community at all.
Take this link for example... https://lemm.ee/c/youtube_feed
There are hundreds of posts by a youtube crawling bot that just seems to be posting random youtube video links and adding the video title as the post description. Only a handful of the two hundred videos posted have any comments and those are just 1-2 people saying this is useless content.
Now before anyone jumps in and says, you can just block the bot, or block the community or...
Yes I could and I will be. But the problem is when someone new comes to lemmy and randomly selects lemm.ee they are going to be inundated with with these low effort no replay video posts and walk away back to reddit.
I dont know the solution to this either. Obviously someone wants this content since they spent the time to set up a bot and a community and etc. But for the life of me I cant understand why that person wants it.
The stats for the community are interesting too.
185 posts, 28 subscribers (probably 28 repost bots) and 4 comments. **4 ** COMMENTS!
Obviously I'm going to block the community from my feed but It makes for a really bad first time user experience when these bot communities with no interactions are populating the default feed for all new users and guests... Again, I dont know the solution to this either... but it's definitely a problem.
First of all, I have made a small change to Lemmy to allow instance admins to set the default feed for new users. The default feed for all new lemm.ee users is actually "All" now!
I think over time, the local feed will probably improve as well for those who are interested in it, but for now "All" seems to be a much safer choice.
As for bots that just mass-post content - I am personally not a fan of them. Maybe it indeed makes sense to tune the algorithm to value bot content less that real human content (at least by a little). I will monitor the situation for a while and try to come up with some ideas.
Kind of a feature request, but I wish "Ignore Community" and "Block Community" were different. Most of the ones I block seem decent, but something like youtube_feed I'd want to "Block" in a way that records my disappointment.
Thank you for your work!
IMO the post bots and bot-only communities should be on their own dedicated instances, and the communities should be labeled that they are bot communities - right in the name.
Then people shouldn’t think twice if they want to copy content from a bot and post it in a “real” community for discussion - especially content that is just a link to a video or an article. It would be weird to do that with story content copied from Reddit (like AITA.) But for links and even some questions and discussion posts, they deserve views and replies.
That way the repost bots would actually serve a purpose and generate “real” content without using resources from “real” instances.
But I feel the bots as they currently operate are actually stifling content that should be posted be real people. e.g. someone finds an article, but sees it was already posted by a bot, so they don’t post it while the bot’s article falls off the page because no one replies or half of users have them blocked.
I mostly support this opinion. Bot-only communities should not be allowed on lemm.ee instance. We can add this to instance rules and throw out such communities.
I'm not against repost bots per se, but I'd allow them only if a community has more people posts than bot posts.
yeah these repost bots are super annoying and not something I was really running into when I was on kbin - I made a lemm.ee account finally yesterday and was so confused on the amount of bot content in my feed 😖
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !youtube_feed@lemm.ee
No, because I dont want people to actually go to the link and get cancer...
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I think it's hilarious someone thought a bot asking if it's the asshole a hundred times in a row was a good idea
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We're in agreement, but I'm more militant for the specific example (amitheasshole).
It's right in the name. If there is no "I" directly involved, than the bot is an asshole. Sprinkle this philosophy liberally when expanding scope to almost all bot content, and it encompasses my opinion with scant few exceptions.
i blocked and reported the bot. its the definition of digital garbage
At some point Lemmy will be big enough that these no-comment posts will just drop off the frontpages, right?
If you open reddit and choose All and new you also get a lot of junk.
I agree on principal but right now lemmy doest work that way. If I go to lemm.ee and select local, top 12 hours 5 posts on that first page are from this youtube bot / community. If I go to page 2 17 of the posts are from this bot / community. Page 3 has 11 posts from them. This goes on for page after page until you hit the end of Top 12 hours.
Not a single one of those has any comments either. So I'm not sure how this is "top" except for the fact that they all have 3 upvotes (probably from upvote bots)
It's a problem and a misrepresentation of lemmy to new users.
Too much content on lemmy is created by bots. It is unclear how they select such content.
Particularly on the news. Too many bots kills diversity...
It might be useful some rule on allowing posts in the news communities only if the user has made a certain amount of comments recently in the same community
When I see a community that only has bot submissions at first glance i immediately leave. It doesn't matter if the bot just started posting ten minutes ago and the rest of the posts are from people, if the first page is all bot spam I scram.
I've noticed a lot of bot authors get extremely defensive and rude when anyone comments on their bot, too. Obviously not every author, but most have that I've seen. How are bots a good thing if the people behind them act like that?
Basically I feel like there's no reason to comment in a bot post. OP isn't going to respond, it's a bot it doesn't even know what it's posting. People will comment though not realizing it's bot and they'll ask questions expecting it to be a person and reply back. That's not a good way to build social groups in my opinion.
How many people enjoyed gallowbob post spam on Reddit? That's all these bots are. Gallowbots.
I do like the idea of bot communities though. Plainly labeled of course. I could see how that could be worth browsing through sometimes.
I feel like this discussion is a very chicken and the egg type. A dead instance with no posts won't attract new people, so you have bots start the discussion with new posts. If the instance is too flooded with new topics you never get users engaged and the instance looks just as dead. The NBA instances have been talking about this. Right now bots do a new post for every game thread, but there are not enough active users to have discussion on all of them. So really it's a pick your poison.
Personally I think the fediverse needs some other kind of unique "gimmick" to draw your more average user in/away from reddit other than "we are the decentralized reddit alternative." I couldn't tell you what that is, but the average person probably doesn't care about the reasons that brought us here, so there needs to be something else to draw them in until instances become more full and engaged.
The NBA bot / thread thing doesnt bother me at all. That sort of content makes sense even if people are not discussing every game. But a lot of these bots are just spamming completely random content with no engagement.
It's worth discussing though. And again, I dont have a solution. To me it just looks bad. The NBA thing and a few other bot accounts dont really both me as much as this youtube repost bot does just because they dont clutter up the top feeds like this bot does. Not sure even how they are getting into the top feed other than having other bot accounts upvote the content.