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!
Yeah, the repost bots just don’t work. Reading the comments is half the fun of using reddit/lemmy, but lemmy has a very small userbase still, so the comments are a little bit slow moving. Having a ton of reposts suddenly spammed in splits that small comment activity up to the point where comments basically don’t exist and you’re viewing a slideshow of empty threads.
I’m all for post that generate discussion and interest. Repost bots do none of that so let’s get rid of them…
Absolutely, I’m all about the human interaction here. The bots on that other site made some posts or communities feel like ghost towns. I don’t want any bot posts.
sounds good
I think this is great, thank you for doing this. The bots that just repost content from Reddit are useless. Generates zero discussion. Especially the ones that copy content from AITA or other similar communities. If the OP is not there to answer questions or respond, what’s the point?
Exactly. If there is no chance of some interesting engagement from OP or others then it is just noise. I have been trying to engage more in Lemmy than I used to in Reddit and I was wondering how to block these type of posts, especially from Reddit, in a more manageable way.
The bots that duplicate over every single comment also aren’t useful, IMO. The comment sections for those posts are so full of bot comments that a human user won’t see any opportunity to create an engagement hook. And if another human DID comment, its so lost in the noise that no one will probably see it or respond. Further, since votes aren’t replicated over, horrible odious comments that got voted into oblivion get copied over with equal weight as good comments
There is this Reddit scraper bot that does it much better: https://github.com/daniel-lxs/BotIt
It can be configured to only scrape highly upvoted external links and that works quite well on one of our communities.
Can you mention the community name? I would actually be interested in a community that shows just highly upvoted, as opposed to everything.
[email protected] The bot is called “Sam BOT” and is run by one of our users.
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 for one fully support this course of action. I’ve been blocking these bots left and right to keep my Local feed from being completely cluttered with posts that aren’t generating engagement, but I’d be more than happy to not need to.
Sorry to hear about your personal situation, but that is quite the silver lining and I am sure Lemmy as a whole will benefit greatly from it. Solid ruleset on bots as well. We are currently rolling out rules about bots on Lemmy World, reading this we might have to go over some of them again. We don’t want to stomp out all bots because some are problematic.
🫶 from Lemmy World
deleted by creator
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 have found the reddit bots a bit annoying. Not to say I don’t want to ever see a reddit link on lemmy, but the communities that are essentially a clone of a subreddit seems kind of pointless. I might as well have stayed on reddit then. So I would love to see those bots go away, or get moved into their own community. But overall, I agree that we should cut down on bit posts. I’d rather see discussion rather than dumps of links.
This will be great. I spend enough time trying to block these bots, so excited to save a little time.
Will it still be possible to view posts by bots on different instances? Kbin.social blocks these from being visible as far as I recall
One of the anime communities utilises a bot to generate discussion posts with links to relevant information as episodes come out for convenience, given the purpose of the community being for discussions, would this be another legitimate use that the rules could account for?
Yes, it will still be possible
Sounds like a great policy!
A very insightful explanation of something that I think sorely needed addressing. Thank you for doing this.
Ahh I’m not going to catch this live but would love to see this. You’ve done so much to help out with Lemmy (and helped me personally with my instance!) So super interested to see this.
I’m all for this!
