How do you all feel about bots?
I’ve seen a gpt powered summarization bot pop up recently. Do you find this useful? Do you hate this?
Do you think bots serve any useful purposes on this website or do you think we should ban all bots? Should we have a set of rules for how bots should interact - only when called, needing to explicitly call out they are a bot on their profile, etc?
I’d love to hear your thoughts
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Do. Not. Want.
One of the things I like about Beehaw is the lack of bot posts in every thread. Personally I think all bots should be banned because it eliminates some unwanted spam, but a good compromise for me is that bots be explicitly labeled, and can only respond to a trigger command. Nothing that auto posts.
Second this, for Beehaw.
Users can already follow any community from another instance with autoposting bots. With the right interface, users can even merge posts from no-bot and yes-bot communities to create their own customized experience.
If you think all bots should be banned, then good news! On Lemmy, bot accounts are (should be) labeled as a bot, and in your profile settings you can disable seeing posts by bots.
That’s a very good setting. Thanks! My only other concern is unlabeled bot accounts but I don’t know if that’s a rampant issue or not.
Yes, I think it’s important to have a “bots must be marked as bots” rule.
I’m sure someone’s got some bots on Lemmy that are actually decent, but I haven’t seen them yet. The bots I’ve seen have just been spamming copies of reddit posts or other articles. I block them, and I usually block the communities they spam.
Bots that spam or “help” > No No bot is going to be able to help every individual the way they need to be helped. Same issue with plenty of “convenience” features in Microsoft products which quickly become an annoyance. Spam is self-explanatory.
Bots that entertain > Maybe in some communities I have seen some quality use of bots for entertainment purposes, especially on meme subs. My favorite use of bots which I have seen is the old subreddit simulator sub which is populated entirely by bots with each bot trained by a popular sub, leading to some very entertaining interactions. The second use I’ve enjoyed was their use on prequel memes, in which bots would react with certain text with the appropriate meme response. I’m not sure bots exactly like these would fit anywhere on Beehaw, but I wouldn’t mind in some communities like Jokes if there was a good one.
Bots for artistic purposes > I’d like to see them as long as they don’t post too often The main example I can think of is Tumblr’s Haikubot which is amazing. If someone happens to post a message with the same structure as a haiku poem, the bot will reply with that post re-formatted as a haiku poem which can be amusing and occasionally profound. I would be ok with the general use of bots like this as long as their parameters don’t allow them to show up often enough to become tiresome.
I think bots can have a place, but I prefer ones that have to be intentionally invoked. I’m thinking of ones like MTGCardFetcher on the Magic the Gathering subreddit, which would post links to the card on Scryfall if you formatted the card name in double brackets in your comment.
In my opinion, such bots indicate more of a need for some kind of easy “pipe” feature to integrate tools to transform a post before publishing, so that all of the tweaks can be done within the post instead of as a bot reply. For example, there could be a “MTG-ify” button that takes the text in the input box, turns the double bracketed names into CommonMark links, and then puts the modified text back into the input box.
Yeah I don’t disagree at all that it would be ideal if some of this kind of functionality could be built into the platform, but obviously that didn’t really happen at Reddit - which is why there were so many similar bots to allow subreddits to create extended functionality - and Lemmy is still new enough that contributors are still trying to fix major issues and get basic functionality working properly. In the meantime bots could fill some gaps, although I lean toward using them very sparingly.
Auto tldr is really cool, this is a bot I support
The auto tldr bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you’d like to change that.
Honestly, as a programmer, I’d like the freedom to share bots that can benefit the community. Although, I do think that there should be measures in place to ensure bots don’t degrade the quality of the community.
Maybe there could be a community on Beehaw where people could post about their bots and associated commands, so we could learn how they could be called into threads where they would be helpful?
This could be added to docs.beehaw.org ;)
Bots can be extremely useful and the flexibility of where and how bots could work was one of the things that made Reddit popular. Before, well, y’know.
Bespoke bots can also allow particular communities to develop local features or functionality. I assume Lemmy’s mod tools are fair bare bones right now too, so I suspect someone, somewhere is probably working on an automod toolkit.
Bots should be allowed, but must be flagged. I don’t know if it’s a default lemmy option, but the app I use has a toggle to hide bot accounts if you don’t want to see them.
That said, I would very much prefer if bots were restricted to just making comments rather than posts. Certain communities have bots that automatically post article links and they completely blanket feeds sorted by new until you block the account.
I’ve started an account on Mastodon recently, and really noticed the bot accounts. If you accidentally follow one of the extremely active bots, all your feed becomes their posts. I don’t think there’s enough people on the Fediverse just yet to be able to drown those bots out when they show up.
😅😅
I kinda wish the ALL feed could be a bit more intelligent. Also, sorry for gunking up your feed!
I’m of the opinion that bots are okay if:
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They provide value to the community - A news-bot seems to be well received at tucson.social and it helps people get all their Tucson updates in one place without having to share it themselves.
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They assist with moderation. Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.
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They enhance the dialogue of the thread or provide useful and important corrections. Perhaps there’s a bot that looks up species names and provides useful links in a reply of a zoological based post? I say that’s great and what we want!
As for ChatGPT bots:
- All bots must disclose they are a bot.
- All bots must not fake engagement. As in, it’s okay to be other bots because of their relatively strict use-cases and minimal ability to hallucinate and no ability to respond to further queries. ChatGPT makes it appear as if it’s a person at times and can be subtly wrong - we have people that do that just fine.
- ChatGPT content should go into their own relevant subs. A MachineLearning community might be good at first, but perhaps eventually a dedicated LLM/ChatGPT Writes type community would eventually be needed for peoples more creative impulses. It’s not exactly relevant for someplace like tucson.social, but might be for a place like BeeHaw.
Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.
IMHO those pinned top messages in Reddit were a stopgap for dealing with highly diverse communities and moderation styles “on a single instance”.
Again in my opinion, the Fediverse would benefit more from having consistent rules per-instance, with only sub-rules on a community level. Both of these should be made easily discoverable to all participants of a “community@instance” directly through their interface (web or app), making the pinned top messages unnecessary.
Communities with “highly diverse moderation styles”, should rather stay on separate instances with similar moderation styles, making it easier for mods to apply a consistent ruleset, for users to decide which instances to follow, and admins whether to federate or not. There already exist interfaces (both web and app) to merge communities from multiple instances if the user so wishes to (at their own risk, but again IMHO the rule differences should be handled by the user’s interface).
Ideally, I think that users should be able to use an interface of their own choice to merge comments on a matching post from multiple instances or groups of instances (federated), interacting in whatever style they choose without interfering with users who didn’t choose that style.
Particularly in the case of Beehaw, which has a consistent set of “rules but not rules” for all communities, I think those messages would only add clutter.
This makes sense, but I think that Lemmy just has this same problem on a different scale (between instances rather than between communities). The problem we have seen sometimes is folks seeing Beehaw posts in the All feed of their home instance and coming in and commenting/posting without knowing what/who we are and without engaging with the sidebar or any of our docs. And some federated sites make it difficult to even tell that you are seeing a post from another instance (I’m looking at you, Kbin). The vast majority of the time it isn’t a huge problem, but it does mean that the mods are having the same conversation over and over because some folks aren’t aware of the vibe of the place where they’re posting.
Now obviously an automatic bot comment would be a band-aid, and I suspect not a particularly effective one (Lemmy doesn’t provide the ability to sticky comments). It would be ideal if there was some functionality built into Lemmy itself to remind users of the instance they are about to post in, and the rules of that instance.
an automatic bot comment would be a band-aid
I’d kind of rather they get this as a direct message or even better a warning on the UI they interact with our site on (we cannot enforce the latter).
Yeah, I had been thinking that a better solution would be some built in Lemmy functionality - I think Reddit actually had a reminder like this on posts, but not comments - but between apps, third-party front ends, and federation with other services like Mastodon and Kbin it probably wouldn’t reach the folks that would most need to be reminded of the rules of the place they’re posting in.
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If they’re informative and/or helpful, I don’t mind bots. If they’re those stupid pointless novelty bots that were plaguing Reddit, they can go away.
The grammar bots were so annoying! I love good grammar as much as anyone, but really, what help are we actually adding to the world with the they’re/their/there bots, the your/you’re bots, the payed/paid bots, etc. I really can’t imagine those changed anyone’s behavior or spelling.
I’m not completely against those, they sometimes made me edit a comment, and can be educational to both native speakers and those learning the language.
However, it’s not nice to force them upon people, it should be each user’s choice whether they want those tips or not, so I’d say: maybe, but not for Beehaw (unless maybe for some “learn-[some_language]” community).
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Bots like gramma and spelling bots should just gtfo. Every bot should be a genuine postitive improvement to a community or otherwise they shouldn’t exist.
Realistically, spell-checking should happen at the comment authoring stage anyway. Given I don’t know how the Lemmy code works at all, I imagine checking for “they’re/their”, “would of/could of” &c. could be an optional UI feature rather than a bot.
I see corrections to my grammar or spelling as positive ;-;
A platform like Lemmy is about communicating in a relaxed non-formal way with others. How you achieve that is fine and spelling mistakes etc don’t really matter. At the very least, such a bot should only be opt-in if you like it. Otherwise, leave the nitpicking to the teachers.
I think a lot of how I interpret them is how they are written. On Reddit there’s a lot of GOTCHA style bots which insult the user for not knowing “perfect” grammar. However, I’ve seen some bots which actually try to explain and help out the user and couch their language in a way where it’s clearly meant to be helpful, especially to English as a second language learners, and I think there’s a huge gulf of acceptability between the two.
I tend to agree but that doesn’t mean we should see bots analysing every post and comment looking for these things either. Lemmy isn’t a school essay or a formal letter where these thing truly matter.
Personally, I come here to relax and discuss topics of interest, not be nitpicked over the posts and comments I make.
I don’t find bots useful. I was on Reddit for years and I didn’t use any of them. I don’t think the door should be closed on bots permanently but for now I’d rather not see them, they’re no better than spam to me.
I’m here to interact with people, not bots. Bots, and everything they do, are soulless.
Bots that can be summoned (e.g. !savevideo, or whatever the command format would be) could be useful. Otherwise, bots can sod off.
Comment bots are mostly fine so long as they are clearly labelled, don’t take up unnecessary amounts of space, have clear purpose and add value to an article or discussion. So stuff like TLDR, Piped, Wiki bots are fine. Stuff like GROND, GPT (even though it’s cool we have a Masto feature that does that), Anakin, Musk bots aren’t useful here imo.
Post bots, I’m kind of on the side of I’d rather not see them, I like talking about articles with the user who posted it. I won’t be too upset if they end up allowed, though. A whitelist, or a strictly enforced guideline would be acceptable for me.
The TLDR bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you’d like to change that.
Thanks, but “I’m fine with it” doesn’t necessarily mean I would miss it if it’s gone.
