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
Same - honestly, I generally find them legitimately amusing! - but I worry that most Lemmy instances are too young/inactive for this kind of bot yet. I don’t think we’re past the tipping point where the people commenting will automatically outweigh the bots, and I don’t think those bots are fun unless they’re dramatically outweighed by normal human interaction. It’s not novel if that’s all the comment thread ever is, you know what I mean? And novelty is the true spark of humor imho; things usually have to be at least a little surprising to be actually funny.
The novelty bots on Reddit were a mixed bag for me. I struggle to think of any that I genuinely found amusing, most of them were at best annoying. The exception might be some of the reply bots on some meme subreddits I was on (r/wetlanderhumor and r/cremposting). There were also a few that, for some reason, really got under my skin. I think the ones that really frustrated me were the grammar bots that regularly replied with irrelevant corrections, and that one Shakespeare bot that “shakespearified” your comment with wildly incorrect early modern English grammar.
That’s an interesting way of putting it that I didn’t immediately consider.
I don’t necessarily like them, but I’m not really all that against them, either. If we don’t have the activity to balance out bot input, however, it might be reasonable to limit them one way or another. It seems to me like a worst-case scenario, but if a community or thread has what feels like a noticeable amount of bots, that would be a turn-off for me.
If the community decides to limit bot traffic either partially or entirely, it might be good to revisit that decision later on if there’s an upward trend in users and activity.