Ask Lemmy

Not a huge fan of the reddit repost bots when we can steal content the old fashioned way by right-clicking!

I’m against it. Bots have poisoned other social media.

I really dislike them.

I thought bot posting may incentivate people to comment

When a bot posts the same gardian link to every news community and then do the same thing for the next article, it kills any chance for comment as the poster is never present in the thread. Example: soyagi@yiffit.net

Many are low grade scams. Example: This user screams scammer to me chouaty1@kbin.social

Others are just marketing spam. Example: This user is just a marketing bot posting over and over links to the same site. raven3312@kbin.social

I am ok with bots as long as:

1. The posts are labelled clearly as such that it's posted by a bot

2. The account itself has some clear indication that it's a bot

By fulfilling this requirements, everyone can decide I'd they want to see these posts or block them.

*** I block some bots..

How do you filter out bots?

…asking for a friend.

I block all post bots, i think they're useless. Those on comments are fine, like the remindme, piped, link fixer, chatgpt, etc.

These bots will kill Lemmy.

It's really annoying when bots steal content from smaller subs where the OP is asking an actual question. I know there is a good chance OP won't see the answers given anyways, but at least there is a chance when posting in the original thread. With a repost bot, there is 0 chance OP will see the answer. Why would I want to engage with that? It's a total waste of time.

Also repost bots were the scourge of Reddit, I activity blocked a lot of subreddits because they were mostly repost bots. With the lack of karma on Lemmy, I hoped the bots would stay away. But alas, it is not so.

I also hate the obsession with Reddit on Lemmy. People have said before, it's like going on a date and talking about your ex the whole time. Stop talking about Reddit, don't setup bots to blindly repost shit and forget about the whole thing.

We need to make Lemmy a success by making it an engaging place, with good content and good people. So get to posting, voting and commenting.

There are actual good bots, but they don't usually post, only comment. The TL;DR bot is a real nice feature to have, especially when the source is a news site with so much ads and crap I can't read the article. Reddit repost bots should be banned imho.

I know repost bots help "fill in" the lack of user activity for some communities but it ends up feeling empty anyway. I think posts (and reposts) should be curated (in a sense) by users. Bots should assist users in creating content, not creating content themselves.

I think the bots for news makes sense.

I don't particularly like all the link fixers and stuff like that in the comments. It's mostly noise, even if the intention is good.

We do not.

I don’t really like them, my feed is now polluted by bots. I’ve already blocked one that reposts Reddit content and I’ll probably beging blocking more of them

I wonder if the bots that are making their own posts (such as the hacker news and reddit X-post bots) should be limited to their own communities. If you want them in your feed, subscribe, otherwise, everyone is ignoring them by default.

!hackernews@derp.foo works that way and I think it's working well so far.

I blocked a few, mostly the ones that kept reposting stuff from Reddit.

fuck repost bots

As long as they keep to their own communities I don't care. If they're leaking into normal ones they gotta go

I actually think posting bots make the platform much more attractive for new users. Tbh the overall quality of content on Lemmy can be dogshit at times in regards of memes, regardless of whether it was a bot post or not. The only way to improve quality in humor is to throw a lot of stuff out there, see what sticks and get that upvoted. A lot of the lower quality content should turn into white noise so you only see it if you're actively monitoring new posts in a magazine.
Informative content doesn't suffer in quality from less contribution in the same way I think.

Genuine question, what's the best way to tell if someone is a bot? Just the nature of their content/reposting of articles and such?

Fuck no.

Not sure if its it's a lemmy vs kbin issue or just the communities I'm subscribed to, but I personally run into very few repost bots

I feel it makes sense for a few communities where the main activity isn't reading or commenting, but rather only looking at images. That said, a bot won't see how well different kinds of content they post do, so they can (and do sometimes) keep posting low quality/effort, spam, marketing disguised as articles, etc.

In some places it makes sense: Memes, jokes, "self sufficient content". But when exmormon has post titles with questions but are posted by a bot, that's useless. There's no interacting with OP.

I think each community has to decide if their content is supported by these bots or not.