1y ago

Bots? OH MY

On Beehaw there are a few tldr bots from other instances. I present Beehaws own summarizing bot developed by yours truly. Based on feedback from moderators and community leaders, I don't just want to let this loose on the entire site. Might cause confusion and spam for a community instead of being useful. If you do like what that bot does, and are a moderator of a community on Beehaw that wants to use it; send a private messaged to AbstractifyBot stating Summarize articles on c/[communityname].

That's just one aspect, but I have a few more questions while I have your attention.

What type of bots if any do you want to see on Beehaw to help things/your community?
Which functions of the 'nice to have' should be built in and not reliant on a bot to do?
What do you need for your communities to thrive here?

7 comments

I like the idea of bots that can summarize articles since oftentimes articles can have fluff to bump up the word count or help with SEO.
I also find (anecdotally) including an article summary in the body of the post helps increase discussion; since some people don't necessarily want to read the whole article but will read a summary, and can then contribute to the discussion.
The problem with summarizing bots, though, is I have a hard time trusting the bots that do the summarizing.
In my (limited) experience with LLMs, they can understand English well enough, but they have a hard time understanding nuances and context clues. Granted, that shouldn't be an issue for a well written article, but it's enough to give me pause.
In regards to automatic features that might be nice: I think automatically generating and including archive links would be helpful. Even if the link isn't paywalled, I personally like including archive links to prevent link rot in the future; especially since I've seen some articles get modified against the author's will after publishing before.
- I agree that they can't always be trustworthy, and I think shorter summaries are better than longer ones for this reason. A short summary/introduction can help someone figure out quickly if the article is something they're interested in reading more about, but hopefully doesn't go too far off the rails. The summary shouldn't replace the article in my opinion, just help someone decide if it's worth their time to read it.
  
  The summary shouldn’t replace the article in my opinion, just help someone decide if it’s worth their time to read it.
  100% agreed.
- Incorporated an archive link for AbstractBots' summary.
- I have a browser plugin now that summarises links (without needing to click on them). More people should use those and I think we should encourage that over these bots.
  If the bot was posting a summary as part of the post I'd be fine with it, but please don't do it as a comment. It's often the last comment anyway, which isn't helpful at all.

It's now at the point where there are two or three "summariser" bots under a post. They don't seem to be adding anything, and we certainly don't need multiple. Are they really useful?
- Yeah I get that, certainly don't like the spammy nature of such. My apologies. I will put AbstractBot on suspension.

7 comments