[META] So... about the bots
As some may have noticed, a fairly large portion of the post on this community are article links posted by bots. I am no moderator and am just a regular user like the rest of you, but I want to know what the community thinks of the posting bots. here is a sample of my opinion to get conversation started:
Pros:
- lots of content to engage with
- people can focus on discussing things not finding thing
Cons:
- lack of reliable quality of article
- lack of diversity of content
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Well, lemmy in general needs content. A lot of content is news and having bots post the news is not different from hooking up an rss feed to fill the feed. It's not the bots that are the problem, it's motivations of those who program them. Are the bots shilling a service/product/viewpoint?
But you wouldn't hook up an RSS feed into lemmy, you would use the feed directly.
The interesting part is the user interaction, if it's just a torrent of bot posts no user is interested in engaging.
I couldn't agree more with the last sentence. I would much rather have less content but knowing that everything I see some human in the other end found it worthwhile posting.
Agreed. I would much rather see fewer posts than bot content. A human OP is going to engage in conversation, and is also likely able to provide more context on the topic of their OP.
I've taken to blocking obvious bots (extremely high post:comment ratio) to keep the same feel as the fediverse had since "rexit".
it's the amount of comments on bot posts that is the problem. I go to news communities on lemmy/reddit too see articles and people's reactions to those articles. If I just wanted to read news, I would go to my news aggregator, not Lemmy.