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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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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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.
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.
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.
Agreed. I would much rather see fewer posts than bot content. A human OP is going to engage in conversation, and is also likely able to provide more context on the topic of their OP.
I’ve taken to blocking obvious bots (extremely high post:comment ratio) to keep the same feel as the fediverse had since “rexit”.
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.
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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’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 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.
To read “raw news” I prefer RSS.
In the community I personally would prefer to see news posts which come with a comment/opinion/question - something from the author of the post.
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
I’d rather not have bots posting outside bot communities. It’s annoying seeing them here.
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).
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.
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
