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submitted 1 year ago by catboss@feddit.de to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

As the service grows, I have noticed more and more people and bots popping up, only posting links to a news article and that's that. Usually there is no post, no summary and nothing from the OP but the link.

What do you all think about this?

Do you think it's a good thing, because it is providing content? Do you maybe find it annyoing and if so, why?

I myself am happy when people take the time out of their say to try to provide content, but for me it's a bit low effort a lot of the times. Bots I tend to block immediately and people it they make it hard for me to reader other posts between all their link-posting.

But I am more curious how you all think about this and whether you consider it good or bad.

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[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 85 points 1 year ago

I absolutely dislike “repost bots”. I prefer communication with real people.

[-] nexguy@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

That's just what a bot would say

[-] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 year ago

I guess we all do, but as of now, we have to choose between lack of content or some bot content

[-] tempest@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 year ago

I suppose it depends on how you define content. Usually when people post it includes some discussion. Those types of posts get drowned in the bot posts however.

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[-] empireOfLove@lemmy.one 43 points 1 year ago

Lemmy, like Reddit, operates like a link aggregator, so news article spam sorted by type into sublemmy's is sort of its "natural state". IMO there's not really anything wrong with it, because it's a good way to get conversations started.

I don't really like the lemmit.online bot that just reposts "archive" posts from Reddit.

[-] DrQuint@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is just another reminder that reddit didn't start its life with comments. Reddit was just the links at first, comments came later, and yes, the first comment was complaining about there being comments and how the site would be ruined.

[-] Emperor@feddit.uk 7 points 1 year ago

I don’t really like the lemmit.online bot that just reposts “archive” posts from Reddit.

Yeah, that was just depressing - we've moved on and it felt like it was trying to drag us back again.

[-] PaupersSerenade@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

My main issue is title formatting. I don't dislike the TIL bot, but I do dislike the long title being cut off in my app.

[-] ElBarto@lzrprt.sbs 24 points 1 year ago

As long as they mark the accounts as a bot account it doesn't bother me, if it gets too much I can just turn on the don't show bot accounts check.

[-] CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

I used to run a news bot on my profile for my community, but some people PM'd me to mark my profile as bot. I also personally use my account so I don't want my other post/comments to be seen as bot activity; and my instance did not permit creation of a second account for the bot only, what should I do to keep the bot running without having my profile marked as bot?

[-] shrugal@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Imo we need to be able to differentiate between bot posts and comments. Posts can often be spamy, but comments are almost always useful.

[-] atlasraven31@lemm.ee 18 points 1 year ago

I feel like it will be increasingly used for propaganda, not discussion. By cherry picking articles, these news accounts will try to shape public opinion.

[-] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Whether or not it’s posted by a bot, real users are the one commenting and voting on it. It’s not going to be useful for spreading propaganda unless it’s something the user base already believes

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I doubt they'll be turned off, it's just hopefully we get enough real users to drown them out

[-] fourohfour@lemmy.fmhy.net 18 points 1 year ago

As long as it's not "spammy" and there's actual engagement or discussion on the posts I don't see an issue. But if the community being posted to isn't engaging with the posts, or it's crowding out the more interesting posts, yeah that's not great and shouldn't be allowed.

[-] livus@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I am a human who posts a lot of news. It's not mainstream news though and it's all been read and selected by me.

Most of it is to a small niche news sub and gets little engagement yet - the 90-9-1 rule applies and we don't have the numbers yet.

If anyone discusses it with me I'm over the moon!

[-] Dick_Justice@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Hate it. If it's a person fine, I guess, but I wish bots weren't allowed to create posts at all. I would rather see Lemmy grow very slowly than see Lemmy become a mirror of Reddit, with shit tons of scraped posts that have little to no engagement on them. That's not a community, it's a newspaper. I don't understand the "massive growth at any cost" mindset.

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[-] redimk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 year ago

I don't mind the news, I absolutely hate the bots.

I said in another comment before, there's an "AITA" bot reposting everything from Reddit, but, who are we supposed to answer if it's a bot that's asking? It doesn't make any sense...

If there is no engagement (or at least something that's educational or informational), then what's the point?

If it was a "TIL" bot I'd probably have a harder time hating on it, but still.

[-] Botree@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

...there's an "AITA" bot

That's ridiculous. Wonder if there's a r/roastme bot somewhere.

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago

Hopefully a lot of the bots are a stop-gap measure while the user base develops.

[-] monk@lemmy.unboiled.info 9 points 1 year ago

There's a voting system. That should give you an idea of whether they're considered good or bad and of their visibility in general.

[-] drzoidberg@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Not if there are more bots than humans upvoting and drowning out the real people.

[-] rubikcuber@feddit.uk 8 points 1 year ago

I hate it. Some communities just fill up my feed with links to news articles with zero (or zero quality) comments. I either unsubscribe from these communities, or block the poster. In some cases they are so frequent, and with images that are effectively advertising. That and the zero comments, they just remind me of Reddit ads. I don't think you can hope to build a community by drowning out any discussion with a flood of posts from news sites. If you're the mod of a community with so little interaction, then you should be curating content and adding comments yourself.

[-] Boklukchia@artemis.camp 8 points 1 year ago

I used to get most of my news from Reddit, now that I don’t use Reddit I get them from here. I post pretty frequently news articles on my country’s community and think that they are a good source for a discussion.

[-] ItsComplicated@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

I am also replacing reddit for news. I currently find it a bit tedious to see the same post on 2 or 3 different sites, however, there are not too many subscribers so I go with it.

I have noticed more interactions with some of the bot posts. If I see at least one comment I check it out and have started engaging that way.

Everything has to find the right rhythm. This takes time (and sometimes duplicate posts).

[-] Boklukchia@artemis.camp 3 points 1 year ago

For sure, duplicate posts are annoying but that’s the nature of the fediverse, I think some apps are trying to combat this but it would take time. Overall I’m pretty happy with my new home here!

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[-] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 8 points 1 year ago

News articles are fine, but I'm not as thrilled with the Reddit reposting bots.

[-] livus@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I get news from the fediverse so I'm very happy with others posting news.

I don't like repost bots though because they tend to be programmed to let non-fedizens control the agenda. Eg scraping what the people of Reddit upvoted.

[-] Ironfist@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My problem with it's poor quality sources and/or content. For example: yellow journalism. I want to be informed and have good discussions, not being outraged or click baited.

[-] ikornaselur@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

It really annoys me, especially as there seems to be at least two lemmy instances that are 99% just a bot reposting everything from reddit.. Really wish I could block whole instances

On kbin you can

[-] Madbrad200@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Block the individual bots. You'll get rid of them in one go.

[-] ikornaselur@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Oh thank you! I couldn't figure out how to do it in the app I use (Liftoff) but with your comment I checked again and found out how!

This makes "All" so much better to explore, thank you!

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[-] danhakimi@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

I'm generally opposed to spambots and unnecessary bots.

If these bots are just, like, CNN wrote a bot to post every CNN article to a news community, that's annoying.

But as long as the bots aren't spammers / advertisers / just annoying as shit, it seems like they're doing something pretty useful without causing any harm. Not opposed to it.

Oh, and the other problem on reddit ends up being that these bots farm karma to make themselves look more legitimate, as though they're people. That's probably something we should keep an eye on long-term.

[-] ArmokGoB@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Not only do I think bots should be banned from making posts, I also think that people that display bot-like behavior should be warned and then banned if they don't stop.

[-] A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl 4 points 1 year ago

is more than fine, is content, what we need, and Manny communities work like that, forbidding to add blablablaba in the text of a post.

[-] CrypticFawn@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As the service grows, I have noticed more and more people and bots popping up, only posting links to a news article and that’s that. Usually there is no post, no summary and nothing from the OP but the link.

I am 100% fine with this.

Not crazy about bots reposting shit from Reddit though.

[-] AnonymousLlama@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

At the end of the day I'd argue that the majority of people want a "Reddit like" experience, with dozens or posts with heaps of engagement. I'm happy to have news / repost bots if the end result is a more engaging comment thread / discussion.

When looking at older Reddit posts, I never enjoyed the comments where the discussion was OP focused. I'm keen to have them phrase the original question / link and then step back and let the discussion naturally form

[-] RatzChatsubo@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Bots that repost suck and the trend needs to stop

[-] SpeedLimit55@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Its mostly useless spam, I have already blocked a few.

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I have learned that the downside of moderating a political community (magazine in my case since I'm on kbin) is that I can't/shouldn't block bad actors because I need to be able to see their content if I'm to moderate effectively.

[-] SpeedLimit55@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I understand, I used to moderate a car forum a long time ago.

[-] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I am a mod of !t_mobile@lemmy.ml and do a decent amount of article posting. Once the community has some organic traffic i will slow down or totally stop doing it. The community has 109 subs but only once in a while is there ever a comment and there may be one post that i didnt make.

[-] Chozo@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I don't mind it, as long as they're keeping it relevant to the communities they're posting in. There's a couple I've noticed that don't seem to respect the intent of the communities too much, but most of the bots I've seen seem to be pretty well-curated so far.

[-] jediToru@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Sorting by new is swarmed with bot posts. Switched to top - 6H on Sync and the difference is huge. But, any activity on lemmy is good in my books. If a space is to be a pinnacle of perfection, it would be too off putting, like tildes. I rarely visit that site anymore.

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[-] breadsmasher@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I get why they exist but my new feed gets spammed with the same bot, same article posted to three communities. excessive

Besides porn and sports bots i don't see them as problem, but you can disable being shown marked bots.

[-] mysoulishome@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I find most of the "news" and "technology" communities useless and boring for this reason and usually end up unsubscribing when a slew of blaaahhhhh fills up my feed. Lots of articles, stories etc just copied and pasted (or scraped) with no context, explanation, insight, commentary. Why does this matter? Why did you posts it? Why should I care?

If you texted a link to this article to a family member or friend...what would you say to explain WHY you're sending it? Would you just send the link and the title with no other details? They would find it weird. Share it with me like we're friends.

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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
129 points (93.9% liked)

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