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.
Hopefully a lot of the bots are a stop-gap measure while the user base develops.
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 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 find most of the “news” and “technology” communities useless and boring for this reason and usually end up unsubscribing when a slew of blaaahhhhh fills up my feed. Lots of articles, stories etc just copied and pasted (or scraped) with no context, explanation, insight, commentary. Why does this matter? Why did you posts it? Why should I care?
If you texted a link to this article to a family member or friend…what would you say to explain WHY you’re sending it? Would you just send the link and the title with no other details? They would find it weird. Share it with me like we’re friends.
I get why they exist but my new feed gets spammed with the same bot, same article posted to three communities. excessive
