As some may have noticed, a fairly large portion of the post on this community are article links posted by bots. I am no moderator and am just a regular user like the rest of you, but I want to know what the community thinks of the posting bots. here is a sample of my opinion to get conversation started:
Pros:
lots of content to engage with
people can focus on discussing things not finding thing
There is a single user who is posting dozens of times a day in my magazine (for which I am a moderator). Another mod on my team has raised the alarm about the user, like surely they're going through a personal crisis to be so terminally online and posting so frequently.
I'm realizing now they might be a bot. The sources of articles are varied, and quality of article is like 30/70 serious/bullshit. The user occasionally comments on the submissions and I'm realizing the comments are generic rabble rousing instead of being complex language or referencing complex details from the articles shared.
Could anyone speak more to how to identify bot accounts? Many thanks!
The only posts bots should be making is mega threads for events. Content posted should be organic from the user to drive discussion and not what some bot wants to repost from Reddit/hn/etc.
I’ve already blocked several bots to improve my experience, since my feed was being overrun by bots posting to various communities.
I’m more annoyed they’re intermingled. The small userbase here isn’t posting enough to fill a feed, but the bots do make things weird.
If you’re in a news community, politics, tech space, etc. it can be pretty annoying to have both bots and users posting. Maybe if it was a news community that was only bots or no bots, that would be an improvement.
I’m fine with bots adding additional content for the moment. There is always the option to block bots you’re not interested in, or to block all bots in your profile settings.
Just wanted to let you know incase you are not aware, you can uncheck “show bot accounts” under settings, as long as the bot is marked appropriately you will no longer see bot posts.
We are listening to the input here, and will have a discussion around the topic.
I think it’s fine for now personally, the only recommendations I would make to you and other bot creators are to add a thing to check that a link hasn’t already been posted, and maybe to decrease the frequency a bit.
As a (hopefully good citizen) bot maintainer, the best advice I can give is to not follow active or new. Hot and top should not show bot posts unless they are being upvoted.
I think the posting bot is still useful at this point. We are big enough to probably be able to sustain the community on our own but posts would be a lot fewer. Now we have a lot of repeats as the bot just grabs everything but if we relied on someone else in the community to post it for us then we would miss a lot as well. I’m fine either way, just my 2¢
I come to the fediverse for a bit of interaction with humans, or at least observe a bit of discourse 😅 I just unsubbed from another community because it was non-stop bot links. I have RSS for that, don’t need it in my lemmy feed too.
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