What are your thoughts on bots and people posting only news articles on lemmy?

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.

jediToru,

Sorting by new is swarmed with bot posts. Switched to top - 6H on Sync and the difference is huge. But, any activity on lemmy is good in my books. If a space is to be a pinnacle of perfection, it would be too off putting, like tildes. I rarely visit that site anymore.

soupspoon,

I’ve never seen any of tildes but I’m interested to know what you mean about it being so perfect that it’s off putting

jediToru,

On the occasions I visited, I felt like the discussions were very serious, something a tightly wound community would have and god forbid if I posted something stupid. Also I believe the users cannot create their own communities which left only a handful of things I was interested to browse there. Tildes refuses to be an alternative for reddit with such an adamant stance on quality

A_Chilean_Cyborg,
@A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl avatar

is more than fine, is content, what we need, and Manny communities work like that, forbidding to add blablablaba in the text of a post.

teydam,

Sounds good to me but also i can get my news from google news so I hope the bot is posting non-mainstream stuff. reddit felt like democrat astroturfing. like too much majory taylor greene. I like to laugh at em too but it just felt.... bought out. HA. bot out. bought out.

Burp,
Burp avatar

Google news is actually fantastic. I picked it up when Reddit dropped and it’s been a great time killer. Encouraged me to sub to a news site and read articles and less comments. Kbin/lemmy have been like a nicotine patch to get off Reddit.

ikornaselur,

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

AngrilyEatingMuffins,
AngrilyEatingMuffins avatar

On kbin you can

callyral,
callyral avatar

you can't do that on lemmy? TIL

Madbrad200,
@Madbrad200@lemmy.world avatar

Block the individual bots. You’ll get rid of them in one go.

ikornaselur,

Oh thank you! I couldn’t figure out how to do it in the app I use (Liftoff) but with your comment I checked again and found out how!

This makes “All” so much better to explore, thank you!

RatzChatsubo,

Bots that repost suck and the trend needs to stop

Ironfist,

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.

Pika,
@Pika@lemmy.world avatar

so far I’ve seen some bots post articles that setup some pretty decent conversation. I am slightly annoyed that it floods but, I just keep my sorting by stuff that’s hot and it’s usually good.

rubikcuber,
@rubikcuber@feddit.uk avatar

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.

ElBarto,

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.

shrugal,

Imo we need to be able to differentiate between bot posts and comments. Posts can often be spamy, but comments are almost always useful.

CaptainBasculin,

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?

AnonymousLlama,
AnonymousLlama avatar

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

ArmokGoB,

Not only do I think bots should be banned from making posts, I also think that people that display bot-like behavior should be warned and then banned if they don’t stop.

FartsWithAnAccent,
@FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world avatar

Depends on the community and the articles I guess. Not a fan of bots making posts unless it’s in comments for something useful like auto TLDR or something.

danhakimi,
danhakimi avatar

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.

Dick_Justice,
@Dick_Justice@lemmy.world avatar

Hate it. If it’s a person fine, I guess, but I wish bots weren’t allowed to create posts at all. I would rather see Lemmy grow very slowly than see Lemmy become a mirror of Reddit, with shit tons of scraped posts that have little to no engagement on them. That’s not a community, it’s a newspaper. I don’t understand the “massive growth at any cost” mindset.

Synthead,

You won’t believe what THIS Lemmy user said in the comments! 😱

incognito_15,

Counterpoint, I’m trying to find a good bot to be a matchbot for a community I made. It’s more effort than I have time to devote to posting a Pre-Match, Match, and Post-Match thread to the community with lineups, match events, and game summary. I wish a bot could take care of that so I could simply comment on the game in each thread.

anon6789,

I’d rather it be people than bots. If it’s someone posting an article of something they’re interested in, I don’t necessarily need an initial comment from them, but if I post one, it’s be nice to get a response back from OP.

Especially if it’s something non-US I like learning how things work on other parts if the world. I didn’t really want a US take on world events when I could get it from someone there.

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