Hey folks!
Bots on lemm.ee
There has been some discussion lately regarding bot accounts on lemm.ee. Many users have noticed that some of our feeds are dominated by bot posts. These bot posts are not super engaging - they generally don’t generate any discussions. The most problematic bots are the ones which just repost large amounts of content from elsewhere.
I have looked over a lot of user feedback on this issue, and also discussed the matter with other lemm.ee admins. We feel that at this time, repost bots are not healthy for lemm.ee, so we are introducing some new rules to limit such bots.
To be clear, I have nothing against users who want to use bots to just help organize and run their communities. The problem is specifically with communities which are not just supported by bots, but actually overwhelmingly run by bots.
Proposed new rules for bots
The rules we are considering are as follows:
- All bot accounts must be explicitly marked as bots (can be done through the API or on the user settings page)
- Bots are not allowed to vote on any posts or comments
- Bots should disclose their specified purpose in their profile description
- Bots should not have a disruptive influence on a community
- Bots should not be responsible for the majority of content in any community
If you are a bot developer and you can already tell that your bot would be in violation of some of these rules, then I am very sorry to inconvenience you, but I would ask to please choose (or consider hosting!) another Lemmy instance for your bot.
These rules are not in effect yet, but if reception is positive, then we will start enforcing these rules from the 1st of August!
Please share your feedback, both negative and positive, in the comments below!
Lemmy programming stream
For some unfortunate personal reasons, I will be having some extra free time in August. A silver lining to this is that I will most likely be able to use some of this free time to increase my contributions to Lemmy!
I’ve had an idea for a while that a programming stream focused on Lemmy might help to bring in additional new contributors and generate additional interest in Lemmy, so today, I am planning to do an experimental programming stream, where I will first try to learn about, and then improve, the 2fa logic which is currently implemented in Lemmy.
Some caveats:
- I am not a streamer or an entertainer, so this might be an extremely boring stream
- I am not some amazing superstar programmer, so I might make dumb mistakes or miss obvious things, please don’t hold that against me 😅
If this sounds interesting to you, I am planning to do a 1 hour stream starting right now at https://twitch.tv/sunaurus. Feel free to jump in! If it’s not a massive failure, then I will also upload a recording later on. Edit: Stream is over, thanks to all who tuned in!
Some bot content is okay, but I agree it should be moderated. Thanks for your effort on this, no disagreement.
Also, thanks for your contributions to making Lemmy great!
I think this might be useful for some kind of automatic aggregation of content from other communities or some specific cases. For example, I liked, when I was on reddit, the subreddit RedditRead on which each post was generated from other subreddit comments, one post by book found in the comment on a specific post in another subreddit. I thought about setting up the same here when I have a bit more time… Now, the posts would be all generated but users could still comments, so it’s not purely artificial stuff…
Maybe one alternative would be to authorize such bot content generated communities but clearly flags them as such in the community sidebar or so. So people who are ok with generated content can subscribe and those who don’t like can block.
In a general way, I have bad feeling about strong rules (except for stuff obviously wrong or destructive but here I don’t think it’s the case), and prefer case by case monitoring. In some cases it can be good for the community and in other very bad, and I find that saying just “it’s forbidden” is too easy and frustrating decision.
Bots should not be responsible for the majority of content in any community
I think this could maybe be qualified a little bit. I think of communities like /r/news or /r/worldnews, and they are quite largely just links from other news sources, that are then discussed, and they’re a type of community I myself really valued from reddit, before moving here.
I don’t think the argument is fair that you should just use RSS if you want aggregation, communities focused on “link aggregation” (which is what Lemmy is on paper, is it not? a “link aggregator”?) provide SO much more. Off the top of my head, communities and community discussion can bypass paywalls, identify misleading headlines, point out related stories or context… I don’t see the problem with communities like this having links seeded by bots. One could argue it actually helps fight bias.
I am 100% on board with ditching all the reddit-scraping bots. Reddit posts are not primary sources of anything.
EDIT: I guess I hadn’t looked for more webcomic communities in a while and there are more available now which have people actually posting OC to instead of just reposting from elsewhere with no discussion. I’ll leave my original comment below regardless.
I’m of mixed opinion about this. I only subscribe to one bot-led community (!comics@lemmit.online) and whilst I hate that every comic is just reposted from Reddit by the bot and so has no comments or discussion, it seems that no comic creators are posting to Lemmy yet and so I would rather still be able to see the content they are creating than miss it entirely. I understand that both the community and the bot are hosted on lemmit.online so they won’t be affected by the bot policy of lemm.ee but it still speaks to the problem of lack of content posted to Lemmy in general (at least in certain communities).
Repost bots need to be regulated in volume. Otherwise this instance becomes an aggregator, and we already have RSS for that.
Big difference with aggregators is that it allows voting on RSS feeds. Also you can discuss articles in Lemmy instead of having to create accounts on each individual site (when it is even possible).
I’m all for post that generate discussion and interest. Repost bots do none of that so let’s get rid of them…
