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  • TLDR Bots can be good, bots can also be bad. We need to find a balance.

    I feel the value of Reddit, Lemmy, and any similar platform does not come from the post itself but (a) the interactions within the comments and (b) the sorting based on votes.

    These two features make information here reliable and obtaining reliable information becomes more productive.

    For example, an article expresses information verified by a single person or a team, but when that article is posted here many people read it and share their opinion. I can go through the comments and determine how bullshit or not that article is. Also, the comments contain quotes, summaries and relevant information which one would have to spend hours researching. Lastly, when multiple articles are posted on a community sorting allows me to find the articles worth my time.

    It does not matter if the post was created by a bot, but whether humans interacted with it.

    With all that, I would like to agree with some people here that bots can be a threat. If the content they produce overwhelms the humans interacting with the content.

    If human content is buried under thousands of bot posts, noone will interact with it. We need lemmings to feel they are valued by their communities, they shouldn't have to compete with emotionless robots.

    • This is a super well said take.. I like the part about the worth being in the comments. I agree. I'm fine with bots, just not spam, or reposts of a thread that requires some type of engagement with OP themselves.

      Also if I sort by all and new, I'd rather not see a million bot posts before I find a real person. Since this is a small community, we are easily overrun by automation. There's definitely a balance to be had.

      And some bots I like, like the tldr bot

  • i haven't tried this yet, but here you go: https://kbin.social/m/BotIt

    edit: wow major brain fart. you DON'T want bots. i thought this was like "can we not just use bots?" my bad

    • I've been using it for the last 24 hours, only to pull link posts to small communities that need a jump-start. People won't post or stay in a community that has no content, and so far the bot has helped start conversations, and has made the communities more active in just 24 hours.

      Once there is enough posting in those communities I'll turn the bot off and focus on a new one. Currently doing this in 3 different communities on lemmy.world

  • @eric5949
    I, for myself, would appreciate if there was a way to block all #bots in the #fediverse. I don't find it to be too bad on kbin/lemmy but OMG, the #mastodon federated feed is mostly bots - I've been blocking entire domains left and right trying to clean it up.

63 comments