I see more and more posts that are just a link to a video, post, or article. There’s no text in the description.
I’d like to see some of the article quoted and/or a brief reason this is currently being posted to Lemmy.
When it’s just a link, the cynical part of me thinks it’s just an SEO bot—especially if the account never posts any comments.
What are some ways to encourage posts that are more engaging?
Or should I just ignore, downvote, and/or block those doing this kind of posting?
Probably mostly a carryover from Reddit where it’s an either one or the other kind of deal.
That’s what the title is for. This is a link aggregator.
Use a better front end that summarizes content, like Tesseract.
The community it’s in should tell you why it’s posted.
Be the change you want to see
I think the place for comments is in the comment section. If you post an interesting article but include your own commentary which is stupid or absurd, I don’t know whether to upvote or downvote.
My opinion: Post the link, don’t editorialize the title, put an excerpt from the article if you want, but don’t put your comments in the post itself.
These low effort posts could as well be bot posts.
Posters should think about that: nobody can decide if you are human or bot.
If there are actually bots in the race posting “against you”, that is, posting links to contrary articles, then the bots are going to win, because they are more and can post more.
Humans should make sure to be recognized as humans.
It is not hard (yet):
Simply add one or two lines that tell us why you have posted this article, what you find remarkable, or what is your own comment.
They are not doing that. But maybe next year or so, yes.
And when they start doing that, then it is the next round in this competition.
Then we humans need to write in such a way as the bots would not do it. This will be easy for the first few years.
They’ve been doing it for years already. There’s bots on Reddit whose purpose is to summarize articles. You can ask off-the-shelf LLMs to have a conversational response to articles today that is indistinguishable from a human response without having a full conversation with the account.
