Beehaw Support

We could put all of the bot commands on them on the page for bots. That said, I expect many people will see one person doing it and copy that behaviour.

I’d just suggest that this is a defacto ban.

To be honest, I'm OK with that. If I want a bot to summarise an article, I'll go to ChatGPT or use Bing Chat. I don't come to BeeHaw to interact with a bot. I'm here to interact with humans and in my opinion it should be a human that decides to post a link to an article and that human should also summarise it. They will do a better job than even the best bot.

While I'm not outright opposed to bots, I have yet to see a bot on Lemmy or Reddit that actually added value to the community. Usually every bot I encounter gets blocked the first time I see it.

Unfortunately a lot of bots on Lemmy that's not really an option, for example a bot that finds interesting articles and posts them on Lemmy... I don't want to see those posts, but at the same time I might want to see the discussion around the article. So I can't block it.

My thoughts are mostly that I wish this were integrated in Lemmy because of a couple reasons:

• People might be interested to see comments, see that there's one in a thread only to realize it's a bot
• The sorting algorithm of lemmy makes no difference between bots and users so it can give a much higher importance to posts which attract bots (namely news)
  • The algorithm really should so I made an issue about it (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3806)
• Posting it as a comment just feels a bit noisy? It takes a lot of space in a thread.
  • On the other hand, maybe it could be hidden by a spoiler tag? I think @nfld0001@beehaw.org mentioned this being a possibility

I liked the original autotldr bot on Reddit. The one here though seems to be producing a large summary instead of just TL;DR.

Here's an example: https://lemmings.world/comment/920986

This comment takes up most of the screen space on my mobile device. I don't consider this to be a TL;DR. At this rate, I'd opt to just read the article in question instead.

The other problem is that lengthy TL;DRs like this obstruct comments, making it annoying to scroll past for those of who are on mobile devices. I could block the bot of course, but I don't want to - I do want a legit TL;DR, not a reworded article.

Here's my attempt at generating a TL;DR of the mentioned article, using ChatGPT:

Two manuscripts published on the arXiv pre-peer-review repository claim to have synthesized a room-temperature superconductor, LK-99. This superconductor is a variation of lead apatite, and allegedly operates not only at room temperature but also above water's boiling point, at regular pressures. The synthesis process is complex, yielding potential variations in the final product. Early attempts to reproduce these findings have shown mixed results, adding to the intrigue and uncertainty surrounding the material's properties. While these claims could potentially revolutionize the field, their validation would give rise to further challenges about how to transform this material into a practical, high-current-carrying form. The upcoming period is likely to see intense activity from labs worldwide in their efforts to corroborate these results, which could significantly accelerate the emergence of a scientific consensus.

IMO, this is what a TL;DR should look like - a single paragraph and under 150 words.

Would it be possible for the bot to DM us instead when communities decide to ban/restrict them for whatever reason?

I've found this bot incredibly useful personally, and I assume the community does too, looking at various Lemmy posts where the TLDR bot upvotes closely follow the OP upvotes (sometimes exceeding it)

Note - I'm not a beehaw user, for anyone reading whose apps do not show my instance.

I'm not sure how to properly tag a user to where they'll definitely get a notification, so I wanted to reply directly to you to make sure you've seen the idea mentioned here in this comment about maybe wrapping the summaries in spoiler tags so that those who want to read it easily can and so that they don't automatically take up so much space to scroll past on smaller screens and those that don't want them maybe aren't as bothered (for lack of being able to think of a better word to use here) by them.

I do appreciate TL:DR; bots but/and I think the spoiler tags idea is a great idea and I would love to see it implemented, if you feel that's something you'd like to do. :)

I'm just trying to understand, generally speaking, how the bot works. It appears to me that the bot is looking for posted articles that exceed a certain word count threshold. If it finds these, then it creates a summary and posts this as a comment. Am I understanding this correctly?

There's been a similar one on Lemmy.