As the service grows, I have noticed more and more people and bots popping up, only posting links to a news article and that’s that. Usually there is no post, no summary and nothing from the OP but the link.
What do you all think about this?
Do you think it’s a good thing, because it is providing content? Do you maybe find it annyoing and if so, why?
I myself am happy when people take the time out of their say to try to provide content, but for me it’s a bit low effort a lot of the times. Bots I tend to block immediately and people it they make it hard for me to reader other posts between all their link-posting.
But I am more curious how you all think about this and whether you consider it good or bad.
I absolutely dislike “repost bots”. I prefer communication with real people.
I guess we all do, but as of now, we have to choose between lack of content or some bot content
I suppose it depends on how you define content. Usually when people post it includes some discussion. Those types of posts get drowned in the bot posts however.
Usually when people post it includes some discussion.
Indeed, but as of now, I feel we are lacking a bit of a userbase to have enough content at all times. I know the part about everyone posting as much as they can, but I guess we still need bots for a bit
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We don’t need bots. It’s concerning some people think any community /needs/ bots. That type of infinite growth mentality is wack and I don’t subscribe to it. Like you, I block almost every bot I come across and my experience only continues to improve.
I can see why some would like them. There are a lot of lurkers who just look at the content and move on without any discussion and that’s ok. For them I suppose it doesn’t matter if its a person or bot if the content is good. Doesn’t mean it’s good for the platform but if it’s kept to a limit and isn’t posting trash I not too concerned. That said those bots or people the post mentioned certainty are annoying.
Exactly, especially for small communities where the community relies or one or two posters
As long as they mark the accounts as a bot account it doesn’t bother me, if it gets too much I can just turn on the don’t show bot accounts check.
Imo we need to be able to differentiate between bot posts and comments. Posts can often be spamy, but comments are almost always useful.
I used to run a news bot on my profile for my community, but some people PM’d me to mark my profile as bot. I also personally use my account so I don’t want my other post/comments to be seen as bot activity; and my instance did not permit creation of a second account for the bot only, what should I do to keep the bot running without having my profile marked as bot?
Lemmy, like Reddit, operates like a link aggregator, so news article spam sorted by type into sublemmy’s is sort of its “natural state”. IMO there’s not really anything wrong with it, because it’s a good way to get conversations started.
I don’t really like the lemmit.online bot that just reposts “archive” posts from Reddit.
I don’t really like the lemmit.online bot that just reposts “archive” posts from Reddit.
Yeah, that was just depressing - we’ve moved on and it felt like it was trying to drag us back again.
My main issue is title formatting. I don’t dislike the TIL bot, but I do dislike the long title being cut off in my app.
As long as it’s not “spammy” and there’s actual engagement or discussion on the posts I don’t see an issue. But if the community being posted to isn’t engaging with the posts, or it’s crowding out the more interesting posts, yeah that’s not great and shouldn’t be allowed.
I am a human who posts a lot of news. It’s not mainstream news though and it’s all been read and selected by me.
Most of it is to a small niche news sub and gets little engagement yet - the 90-9-1 rule applies and we don’t have the numbers yet.
If anyone discusses it with me I’m over the moon!
I hate it. Some communities just fill up my feed with links to news articles with zero (or zero quality) comments. I either unsubscribe from these communities, or block the poster. In some cases they are so frequent, and with images that are effectively advertising. That and the zero comments, they just remind me of Reddit ads. I don’t think you can hope to build a community by drowning out any discussion with a flood of posts from news sites. If you’re the mod of a community with so little interaction, then you should be curating content and adding comments yourself.
My problem with it’s poor quality sources and/or content. For example: yellow journalism. I want to be informed and have good discussions, not being outraged or click baited.
I feel like it will be increasingly used for propaganda, not discussion. By cherry picking articles, these news accounts will try to shape public opinion.
Hopefully a lot of the bots are a stop-gap measure while the user base develops.
Bots that repost suck and the trend needs to stop
I’m generally opposed to spambots and unnecessary bots.
If these bots are just, like, CNN wrote a bot to post every CNN article to a news community, that’s annoying.
But as long as the bots aren’t spammers / advertisers / just annoying as shit, it seems like they’re doing something pretty useful without causing any harm. Not opposed to it.
Oh, and the other problem on reddit ends up being that these bots farm karma to make themselves look more legitimate, as though they’re people. That’s probably something we should keep an eye on long-term.
It really annoys me, especially as there seems to be at least two lemmy instances that are 99% just a bot reposting everything from reddit… Really wish I could block whole instances
At the end of the day I’d argue that the majority of people want a “Reddit like” experience, with dozens or posts with heaps of engagement. I’m happy to have news / repost bots if the end result is a more engaging comment thread / discussion.
When looking at older Reddit posts, I never enjoyed the comments where the discussion was OP focused. I’m keen to have them phrase the original question / link and then step back and let the discussion naturally form
News articles are fine, but I’m not as thrilled with the Reddit reposting bots.
I get news from the fediverse so I’m very happy with others posting news.
I don’t like repost bots though because they tend to be programmed to let non-fedizens control the agenda. Eg scraping what the people of Reddit upvoted.
I used to get most of my news from Reddit, now that I don’t use Reddit I get them from here. I post pretty frequently news articles on my country’s community and think that they are a good source for a discussion.
I am also replacing reddit for news. I currently find it a bit tedious to see the same post on 2 or 3 different sites, however, there are not too many subscribers so I go with it.
I have noticed more interactions with some of the bot posts. If I see at least one comment I check it out and have started engaging that way.
Everything has to find the right rhythm. This takes time (and sometimes duplicate posts).
For sure, duplicate posts are annoying but that’s the nature of the fediverse, I think some apps are trying to combat this but it would take time. Overall I’m pretty happy with my new home here!
I am also. I find myself looking for answers here more and more.
