Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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Personally - I think any bot that could be straight Lemmy functionality shouldn't exist but that said, I think good ground rules would be :
I also vote for these rules!
I agree - these seem to me like very common-sense rules.
If they're informative and/or helpful, I don't mind bots. If they're those stupid pointless novelty bots that were plaguing Reddit, they can go away.
The grammar bots were so annoying! I love good grammar as much as anyone, but really, what help are we actually adding to the world with the they're/their/there bots, the your/you're bots, the payed/paid bots, etc. I really can't imagine those changed anyone's behavior or spelling.
Honestly, as a programmer, I'd like the freedom to share bots that can benefit the community. Although, I do think that there should be measures in place to ensure bots don't degrade the quality of the community.
Maybe there could be a community on Beehaw where people could post about their bots and associated commands, so we could learn how they could be called into threads where they would be helpful?
This could be added to docs.beehaw.org ;)
Please keep the bots to a minimum.
Approved bots that the admins manually review the use cases for is absolutely fine.
I just don't want things to revert back to reddit days where I'm constantly BLOCKING new novelty bots that are absolutely freaking useless and add nothing to a conversation.
Also; PLEASE; implement the following ideas into a(n) agreement/covenant for bot operators; I quote this directly from the Tao of IRC:
The master Nap then said: "Any automata should not speak unless spoken to. Any automata shall only whisper when spoken to."
This philosophy makes sense for IRC, but how would this work on Beehaw/Lemmy? You have to DM a bot to interact with it? How would people even know it exists? In IRC there is a list of users in the channel you can scan for helpful bots. I'm failing to see the equivalent with Lemmy.
Comment bots are mostly fine so long as they are clearly labelled, don't take up unnecessary amounts of space, have clear purpose and add value to an article or discussion. So stuff like TLDR, Piped, Wiki bots are fine. Stuff like GROND, GPT (even though it's cool we have a Masto feature that does that), Anakin, Musk bots aren't useful here imo.
Post bots, I'm kind of on the side of I'd rather not see them, I like talking about articles with the user who posted it. I won't be too upset if they end up allowed, though. A whitelist, or a strictly enforced guideline would be acceptable for me.
One of the things I like about Beehaw is the lack of bot posts in every thread. Personally I think all bots should be banned because it eliminates some unwanted spam, but a good compromise for me is that bots be explicitly labeled, and can only respond to a trigger command. Nothing that auto posts.
If you think all bots should be banned, then good news! On Lemmy, bot accounts are (should be) labeled as a bot, and in your profile settings you can disable seeing posts by bots.
I say no to bots. I see the utility in some of them, but beehaw is only one instance, and I'd love to keep it an instance that I know is full of actual people. Makes me want to engage in conversation much more. Besides, if you want a bot filled experience you can engage in one of the instances that allow bots. If bots are allowed, I want them to be very clearly labeled. I want to know in one glance if I'm speaking to a bot.
I think bots can have a place, but I prefer ones that have to be intentionally invoked. I'm thinking of ones like MTGCardFetcher on the Magic the Gathering subreddit, which would post links to the card on Scryfall if you formatted the card name in double brackets in your comment.
I don't want bots on Beehaw. Either unknown ChatGPT generated comments or bots that just listen to keywords and hey heres a Wikipedia link type. I want discussion from real, good, people with opinions. Not a bot with useless commentary I could just Google(Kagi) instead. Rules around this type of bot is okay, this isnt gets into rules lawyering and favoritism. My vote is no to bots.
Is anyone checking the AI "summariser" bot for accuracy? I'd rather not get misleading ideas in my head from a poor summary.
Is someone checking human summarizers as well? I mean, humans make mistakes but also generally adds flavours, and can focus on things due to inherent bias. In fact, this is actually an area were bots can probably produce more factually correct and unbiased summaries than humans (depends on the quality of course).
The way past both is to actually read the article?
I dislike content that has been auto-posted by bots. I treat it like spam instead of genuine content.
I would love to see a "bot" flag and a parameter on your profile to not show any "bot" content.
I guess people who make bots are scared that the Lemmy platforms would eventually stop seeing activity because of a lack of content. But I think that if there were little to no activity, perhaps people would be posting more. I doubt that flooding the platform with auto-generated content or auto-forwarded content actually helps with encouraging people to stay.
IIRC there is already a bot flag on profiles, though it relies on bot-makers manually setting it and as far as I'm aware you can't automatically block all bot users (though I haven't tried every single Lemmy app).
I'm of the opinion that bots are okay if:
They provide value to the community - A news-bot seems to be well received at tucson.social and it helps people get all their Tucson updates in one place without having to share it themselves.
They assist with moderation. Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.
They enhance the dialogue of the thread or provide useful and important corrections. Perhaps there's a bot that looks up species names and provides useful links in a reply of a zoological based post? I say that's great and what we want!
As for ChatGPT bots:
98% of bots are crap. The problem is that people have different opinions as to which 98% of them is the crap portion.
Absolutely any bot needs to self-identify.
I'm in favor of the guidelines listed by @Lionir for bots operating on Beehaw. Particularly the part about contacting community mods before deploying - it feels like the nice thing to do before adding new wrinkles to the moderation workload (which includes monitoring discussions about the appearance of the bots). That also provides an opportunity for a discussion within the community to engage with, or pre-emptively disengage from the bot account should they choose, rather than having to do it in the spur of the moment.
Bots can be extremely useful and the flexibility of where and how bots could work was one of the things that made Reddit popular. Before, well, y'know.
Bespoke bots can also allow particular communities to develop local features or functionality. I assume Lemmy's mod tools are fair bare bones right now too, so I suspect someone, somewhere is probably working on an automod toolkit.
Bots should be allowed, but must be flagged. I don't know if it's a default lemmy option, but the app I use has a toggle to hide bot accounts if you don't want to see them.
That said, I would very much prefer if bots were restricted to just making comments rather than posts. Certain communities have bots that automatically post article links and they completely blanket feeds sorted by new until you block the account.
I've started an account on Mastodon recently, and really noticed the bot accounts. If you accidentally follow one of the extremely active bots, all your feed becomes their posts. I don't think there's enough people on the Fediverse just yet to be able to drown those bots out when they show up.
Honestly the only bot I've actually found myself missing is the metric/imperial conversion one, makes talking with Americans a lot easier!
I think some comment bots are nice, like the TLDR / summarization bot, reminder bot, youtube piped links, maybe one that replaces an amp link with the original? But these bots should be labeled as bots in settings so users have the option to toggle off seeing them.
I don't like having bots post posts though, I've seen some in other instances and there's not much discussion happening in the comments a lot of the time.
I just saw a summarization bot on here make a summary that was longer than the post. Kind of silly.
My opinion is that bots should be classed by how they operate.
Summoned bots should be mostly free of restriction. If it needs someone to explicitly summon it, then the onus is on them to not needlessly summon bots. Requiring explicit
Keyword/auto-summon bots should at a minimum be required to implement easy user/community/instance opt-out. I think the most viable would be allowing auto-summon only when explicitly allowed by the user, community, or instance, but allow them to reply to manual summons without restrictions.
So how it would work is if someone had a bot that would, for example, post Nitter links in response to Twitter links, it would be allowed to:
Bots like gramma and spelling bots should just gtfo. Every bot should be a genuine postitive improvement to a community or otherwise they shouldn't exist.
Bots that can be summoned (e.g. !savevideo, or whatever the command format would be) could be useful. Otherwise, bots can sod off.
Bots like that one that changes YouTube links to Piped are good, as are bots like a metric/freedom unit converter. A well done meme bot could even be good. I just don't like the ones that pretend to be human.
I'm glad ya'll have made it to where I can easily block them all in the settings. I guess some people like them tho; so that's a happy medium.
Any bot I can think of is one I can do without. Beehaw is about human communication and while I can see bots eventually being useful currently they are just annoying. I'd like to eventually see them brought in under strict guidelines.
I can see value in a summarization bot or an auto moderator so long as allowing some didn't turn into a burden on the admin team on which ones to allow.
I think their value can easily be outweighed if there are too many bots providing no value.
I like summary bots, summoned bots that serve a purpose, and meme bots if they stay in specific communities where they are expected to be. All bots should self identify.
I could be mistaken but doesn't Lemmy just have a setting for the user to not see bot posts?
I also figure users can block specific bots if they don't like them.
I have no issue at all with utility bots (AutoMod-style assistants, summarizers, unit conversion aids, RemindMe!, etc.) and honestly, novelty comment bots don't bother me much either as long as they're not drowning out actual conversation. I'm less tolerant of bots posting links and content, though.
novelty comment bots don't bother me much either as long as they're not drowning out actual conversation
Same - honestly, I generally find them legitimately amusing! - but I worry that most Lemmy instances are too young/inactive for this kind of bot yet. I don't think we're past the tipping point where the people commenting will automatically outweigh the bots, and I don't think those bots are fun unless they're dramatically outweighed by normal human interaction. It's not novel if that's all the comment thread ever is, you know what I mean? And novelty is the true spark of humor imho; things usually have to be at least a little surprising to be actually funny.
I don't care for most bots, especially the bots that repost content, but unless they're actually harmful I don't think they necessarily need to be banned because it's easy for people like me to block them individually.
You don't even have to block them individually. If you uncheck "show bot accounts" in the settings, they are all gone.
Now if it's a bot account not registered as a bot account, circumventing that setting, that should be banned.
I'm here to interact with people, not bots. Bots, and everything they do, are soulless.
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My thoughts on this is pretty much voiced by some of the others.
For instance, there was a tool that could be used to repost things from a reddit user page. I've warned (and the dev have added the warning to the repo itself) that the tool can cause one to be banned. Now the only way I can see that working without inciting a ban is if the tool was triggered by a command, and only took one link at a time. Assuming the mods already gave permission. Something like the wiki bot I've seen over on reddit that posted the overview of a wiki link. However, I would rather be able to trigger it with a !wiki or something to that effect.
The only exception I would take with this is with an automod that reminds users to include specific things in their posts...but I'm also meh about this. If people post without reading the sidebar, they're probably not going to bother coming back and reading a comment. This issue would be better solved through other means (a reminder of the community rules in the New Post page, after choosing a community).
The bots 100% need to have the bot tag on. No bots impersonating as people, please.
That's my 2¢ for now.
Bots that spam or "help" > No No bot is going to be able to help every individual the way they need to be helped. Same issue with plenty of "convenience" features in Microsoft products which quickly become an annoyance. Spam is self-explanatory.
Bots that entertain > Maybe in some communities I have seen some quality use of bots for entertainment purposes, especially on meme subs. My favorite use of bots which I have seen is the old subreddit simulator sub which is populated entirely by bots with each bot trained by a popular sub, leading to some very entertaining interactions. The second use I've enjoyed was their use on prequel memes, in which bots would react with certain text with the appropriate meme response. I'm not sure bots exactly like these would fit anywhere on Beehaw, but I wouldn't mind in some communities like Jokes if there was a good one.
Bots for artistic purposes > I'd like to see them as long as they don't post too often The main example I can think of is Tumblr's Haikubot which is amazing. If someone happens to post a message with the same structure as a haiku poem, the bot will reply with that post re-formatted as a haiku poem which can be amusing and occasionally profound. I would be ok with the general use of bots like this as long as their parameters don't allow them to show up often enough to become tiresome.
There are most definitely some useful bots, like the recent tldr that I've encountered. I find them incredibly valuable. They should be used sparingly though.
"Fun" joke or game bots could be okay with if they were in specific communities that wanted them (which would be communities I'm not a part of, 😁), but not in general. I tend to be a purist and like to keep things as vanilla as possible.
I don't think I have a strong opinion toward bots. They could get gimmicky and unnecessary, but I never felt like they detracted from my experience to a noteworthy degree. I don't think I ever disliked bots too much on Reddit? But then again, I rarely liked or wanted bots, either. I have a loose leaning toward letting people reasonably experiment with how they interact with a platform online, but "bots" as in the kind of stuff I remember from Reddit seem like a relatively weak expression of that. If I had to put an opinion down, I'd say that I'm in favor of their continued presence with the caveat of some guidelines and defined best-practices. Otherwise, if I wake up one day to learn that bots are banned on Beehaw, admittedly I wouldn't be all that bummed about it.
th3raid0r and Lionir seem to get pretty well at the kind of recommendations I'd like to see. Bots ideally should provide a meaningful contribution to communities. Bots should be clearly labelled and identifiable as such. Bot creators should have consent from the community's moderators to have a bot interact within the community. The Cardinal Be^e^ Nice applies here, perhaps to a greater degree: bots shouldn't be used to fake engagement, impersonate people, commit technical attacks on the community, etc.
the_itsb also reminded me of another aspect: we may want to consider how active and populated a community is. Bots take up the attention and visual space of everyone else browsing a community and its discussions. It strikes me as a worst-case scenario, but I could imagine it's possible for a bot overabundance to choke out legitimate conversation. That's enough for me to start thinking twice about whether or not I have a loose stance on this.
I'm sure someone's got some bots on Lemmy that are actually decent, but I haven't seen them yet. The bots I've seen have just been spamming copies of reddit posts or other articles. I block them, and I usually block the communities they spam.
I'm here for the people. I don't want to be a part of a community that is bots talking with bots, which is what I felt like places like Reddit had become. When I found Beehaw, it was a breath of fresh air to actually see intelligent conversations between real people. I'd hate to see that be lost.