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.
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.
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.
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.
I absolutely dislike “repost bots”. I prefer communication with real people.
I guess we all do, but as of now, we have to choose between lack of content or some bot content
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.
Bots that repost suck and the trend needs to stop
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
Hopefully a lot of the bots are a stop-gap measure while the user base develops.
