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.

85 points

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

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19 points

That’s just what a bot would say

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10 points

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

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15 points

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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-1 points

Usually when people post it includes some discussion.

Indeed, but as of now, I feel we are lacking a bit of a userbase to have enough content at all times. I know the part about everyone posting as much as they can, but I guess we still need bots for a bit

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43 points

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.

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16 points
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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.

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7 points

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.

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3 points

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.

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24 points

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.

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5 points

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?

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

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18 points

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.

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3 points

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

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3 points

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

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18 points

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.

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6 points
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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!

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