ChaRRdude33, 10 months ago

I’m all for post that generate discussion and interest. Repost bots do none of that so let’s get rid of them…

Rognaut, 10 months ago

Absolutely, I'm all about the human interaction here. The bots on that other site made some posts or communities feel like ghost towns. I don't want any bot posts.

SuperSpaceFan, 10 months ago

I’m excited to see less bots.

fievel, 10 months ago

As almost everybody seems to agree (with regards to the comments on this post), why don’t you simply state that reddit repost bots are forbidden on this instance and not generalize to each and every bot while there can be some useful use-case for news, aggregation from other Lemmy communities or so… I have the feeling that talking about reddit related stuff become a bit the elephant in the room…

sunaurus, 10 months ago

Well, the most reported bot at the moment is not a Reddit repost bot at all. We would like to solve the issue on a more general level at the moment - by limiting volume of bot content in relation to organic user-created content.

fievel, 10 months ago

Seems fair, understood the objective and the fact you’re not closed to change your mind later. If you have no plans to defederate with instance hosting boys I think it’s not a bad thing to have instances for bots and other for human users only…

HelloHotel, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Honestly, i love and hate the alternate youtube frontend bot, i love that it links to a better client bit it does clutter things up. I would love if it was brief and stuck its explanation on its website or a spoiler, the bot takes up as mutch text is this paragraph just to give you the link,

mockup of a better post style

Here are privicy respecting ways of viewing this media

• "…go here to see the geraffes…“
• ”…I posted a link to it…"

why you should care

Where it puts the relivant sentences into quotes and replaces the links with privicy respecting ones, also should not notify users of a new message, that requires a change to lemmy api

HelloHotel, 10 months ago

We really should add a “dont contribute to metrics” and “metrics meed to be above X to be shown in Y” option applyabe to your posts or via the API

WarmSoda, 10 months ago

If you browse lemm.ee not logged in at the time of this comment all you see are pages of bots reposting reddit threads. There’s no way anyone that sees that decides “oh this place is cool, I’m going to sign up”.

WizzCaleeba, 10 months ago

I have found the reddit bots a bit annoying. Not to say I don’t want to ever see a reddit link on lemmy, but the communities that are essentially a clone of a subreddit seems kind of pointless. I might as well have stayed on reddit then. So I would love to see those bots go away, or get moved into their own community. But overall, I agree that we should cut down on bit posts. I’d rather see discussion rather than dumps of links.

JakenVeina, 10 months ago

Bots should not be responsible for the majority of content in any community

I think this could maybe be qualified a little bit. I think of communities like /r/news or /r/worldnews, and they are quite largely just links from other news sources, that are then discussed, and they’re a type of community I myself really valued from reddit, before moving here.

I don’t think the argument is fair that you should just use RSS if you want aggregation, communities focused on “link aggregation” (which is what Lemmy is on paper, is it not? a “link aggregator”?) provide SO much more. Off the top of my head, communities and community discussion can bypass paywalls, identify misleading headlines, point out related stories or context… I don’t see the problem with communities like this having links seeded by bots. One could argue it actually helps fight bias.

I am 100% on board with ditching all the reddit-scraping bots. Reddit posts are not primary sources of anything.

fievel, 10 months ago

Completely agree with you, some slight difference should be applied to this rule to state clearly what should be avoided and what is valuable.

sunaurus, 10 months ago

It seems lemm.ee is not at a scale yet where we can allow even such useful bots without overloading our local feeds with bot posts. I am sure we can re-evaluate this if activity continues to grow, though.

orcrist, 10 months ago

Repost bots need to be regulated in volume. Otherwise this instance becomes an aggregator, and we already have RSS for that.

pedroapero, 8 months ago

Big difference with aggregators is that it allows voting on RSS feeds. Also you can discuss articles in Lemmy instead of having to create accounts on each individual site (when it is even possible).

Navarian, 10 months ago

I’m all for pretty much all of these changes. The only thing I’d give feedback on is specifically this line.

Bots should not have a disruptive influence on a community

I think this needs a clear definition, before I can say that I agree with that.

Just my thoughts.

Terevos, 10 months ago

Fine by me. I’ve already blocked a few bot accounts that were spam posting

colforge, 10 months ago

I for one fully support this course of action. I’ve been blocking these bots left and right to keep my Local feed from being completely cluttered with posts that aren’t generating engagement, but I’d be more than happy to not need to.

LedgeDrop, 10 months ago

I really think the “simple” approach of categorizing bot VS non-bot and federate vs defederate are only masking the underlying problem : all posts do not have the same amount of “value”.

However, with Lemmy they do. And I think this is what’s broken. If you or anyone in the community has time or interest, I think focusing on rewriting the “what’s hot” algorithm would reduce/remove many of these “workarounds” (like the one you’re suggesting).

(I’m just thinking out loud) but a better “what’s hot” would have each post weighted:

1. Against the number of people subscribed to a channel (more subscribers == more relevance)
2. Against the average number of comments by different users/ post / community. (many comments from different users == more relevant) This would implicitly address the issue of bot spam, that you mentioned.
3. An upper limit on new topics / community. This would avoid the meme community from hijacking all of “what’s hot”.

Of course this cannot all be done in real time. Things like “average number of comments per post” could be precalculated daily, but I think it’ll be “good enough” and a radical improvement to what Lemmy currently offers.

fievel, 10 months ago

I think this might be useful for some kind of automatic aggregation of content from other communities or some specific cases. For example, I liked, when I was on reddit, the subreddit RedditRead on which each post was generated from other subreddit comments, one post by book found in the comment on a specific post in another subreddit. I thought about setting up the same here when I have a bit more time… Now, the posts would be all generated but users could still comments, so it’s not purely artificial stuff…

Maybe one alternative would be to authorize such bot content generated communities but clearly flags them as such in the community sidebar or so. So people who are ok with generated content can subscribe and those who don’t like can block.

In a general way, I have bad feeling about strong rules (except for stuff obviously wrong or destructive but here I don’t think it’s the case), and prefer case by case monitoring. In some cases it can be good for the community and in other very bad, and I find that saying just “it’s forbidden” is too easy and frustrating decision.

rm_dash_r_star, 10 months ago

Some bot content is okay, but I agree it should be moderated. Thanks for your effort on this, no disagreement.

Also, thanks for your contributions to making Lemmy great!