Do we really need these many posting bots?
Every day I am noticing more and posts by bots.
At first it didn't bother me as I thought bot posting may incentivate people to comment but since this rarely happens and now I think they are just polluting the communities.
I know I can filter them but I wonder what is the general sentiment about this.
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Not a huge fan of the reddit repost bots when we can steal content the old fashioned way by right-clicking!
Right, every Reddit repost boy gets a downvote from me.
I don't know if it makes a difference, but i don't want to read Reddit through lemmy via a bot.
Easy solution: Block these bots.
I’m against it. Bots have poisoned other social media.
I really dislike them.
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: [email protected]
Many are low grade scams. Example: This user screams scammer to me [email protected]
Others are just marketing spam. Example: This user is just a marketing bot posting over and over links to the same site. [email protected]
I wish actual humans would also stop reposting shit. Karma farming is not necessary on Lemmy or Kbin.
I mean.... There is... It's just hidden by the default UI. It's exposed in voyager... You have 904 comment karma for example (and no post karma).
Bots posting news articles is fine IMO. It prompts discussion in the comments. Most news articles posted on Reddit came from bots too.
I think it just gets annoying when you see bots posting the same article across multiple communities, or worse, other bots reposting the same story a few days later. I don't want to keep scrolling past the same story for a week straight.
I am ok with bots as long as:
The posts are labelled clearly as such that it's posted by a bot
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..
I actually dislike posts that have a bunch of clutter in the title... It just makes it look fake.
Disagree with your first point. If the account itself is labelled as a bot then that's good enough. I'm mostly on Jerboa and it adds an icon next to bot accounts' usernames.
That's literally their first point. How do you disagree with it when you have and use it? What?
The distinction you are missing is indicating the post is from a bot rather than indicating the account is a bot. The difference in that distinction is that many Lemmy readers will not indicate anywhere on a post that it is from a bot simply because the account is labeled as a bot.
Can you reveal their names?
“bot” and “bOt” are the main offenders I see. Sometimes it’s ok and useful, but “bOt” got a bit too zealous with the same thing going across multiple communities
yeah I blocked those too. Got tired of seeing posts copied and pasted from reddit, all of which with zero comments
I block all post bots, i think they're useless. Those on comments are fine, like the remindme, piped, link fixer, chatgpt, etc.
I forgot the username of the remindme bot ☹️
@[email protected] in 5 minutes
Edit: didn't work 😒
@elxeno @lemann (dev here) sorry, the bot went down without me realizing. I just brought it back up 😳
Cool, thanks!
How do you filter out bots?
…asking for a friend.
settings > untick show bot accounts
Thanks fucker, that was helpful. 👍
Fucker knows a thing or two.
This should be the top comment
It’s a joke my friend.
And unfortunately like a frog in biology class when I dissect the joke it’s going to die, so here we go:
Parent comment made it sound like it was very basic knowledge of Lemmy to block bots and because I didn’t want to appear dumb I added the ‘for a friend’ even though I intended that it was obvious I was asking for myself.
The failed attempt at misdirection should have been humorous.
Should've asked for your dog.
Your Lemmy profile settings include an option to not show bot accounts.
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.
It feels like a waste of my time engaging in a port the seeing its a bot after I started a comment. I always delete a d move along. I guess I should just block them.
These bots will kill Lemmy.
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
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 actively 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.
We do not.
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.
The problem is that they often repost news that has already been posted in the community. It gets quite annoying.
I don't see that a lot, because I'm only subscribed to the most populated communities whenever there are multiple.
Anyway, I don't know much about bot programming, but it seems possible to make the bot check the community for similar URLs in the last couple of days so it could skip the ones already posted.
it seems like lately, about 80% of my all feed is the same stories posted on different communities by the same bot. This, IMHO, causes loss of OC posts by users on the feed. I want to block the bot, yet some of the news stories it posts interests me so I'm actually a little torn? I like the all feed so I can find communities I might want to subscribe to, like a lot of others. However, it is hard to find that if the feed is being overtaken by one story on every other post. On the other hand, it's nice seeing the replies from other people on the different communities. If only there was a way to have Lemmy point to existing communities with the same name upon creation.
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.
![email protected] works that way and I think it's working well so far.
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?
Accounts can indicate whether they are bots. You can even filter posts from bot accounts.
I blocked a few, mostly the ones that kept reposting stuff from Reddit.
fuck repost bots
Especially when that reddit post was a personal question or something else that was supposed to spark a discussion... And it just gets copied here where the comments are lost.
As long as they keep to their own communities I don't care. If they're leaking into normal ones they gotta go
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.
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.
We need more people posting. As someone that has tried to make more general posts, it is a job for bots. Posting anything and having to see the constant negativity of the sludge at the bottom is unsustainable. Everyone that I have seen try here, quits. If you have not posted general content regularly to match the bots, respectfully, STFU
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
Yea me too ... I don't think I really know what this is about.
I've recently got the feeling that there is a pocket of lemmy that is much more of a reddit replication than I was aware of. Like, I think a bunch of the big communities over on lemmy.world like TIL or Asklemmy etc (I'm not sure I subscribe to any of these) are all affiliated and moderated by the same team ... which seems like a pretty dedicated effort to getting a new-Reddit set up. Cool if that's your thing ... but I'd be guessing that it's in that sort of space that bots are more prevalent??
Blocking the lemmit bot was enough to avoid them for me.
what's that bot? Does it cross post from reddit?
Yes
https://lemmit.online/u/bot
How do we know that they are bots ?
If they're well-behaved bots, there's a "bot user" flag the creator would set on the lemmy profile/settings page. That's the available in the API and usually shows up as a
Btag on the web UI (hovering says bot iirc) and a robot icon in many of the apps.Because they often have “bot” in their name to make it clear.
I'm fine with bots posting news articles, but there are other communities I'm seeing that are basically 100% bots now and it is just annoying to see.
There is a bot somewhere down the feed posting a comment from reddit complaining about there being to many bots lately.
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.
What's the difference between bots and people manually reposting content? Also didn't lemmy.world ban repost bots?