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!
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?
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.
!solarpunk@slrpnk.net The bot is called “Sam BOT” and is run by one of our users.
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.
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.
When I see a community that is all bot generated content from Reddit, it’s an instablock for me. Thanks for cracking down.
Great news, honestly! I rather have less content, but actual interaction than all those bots reposting.
And I’ll try to check out your stream, sounds really interesting! Hopefully my internet will be also agree, haha
Thank you thank you thank you! I was just feeling extremely annoyed last night when my entire feed was nothing but YouTube reposts from a bot. If that’s what I wanted to look at, I would just go to YouTube. I think this will be an overall very positive change.
They definitely have certain times that they post, I’ve noticed. I’ve been on overnight a couple times (EST) and New gets flooded with bot posts.
That may be because there’s less people posting so they show up more, but I don’t think so. I’ve seen nothing but pages of bot posts all in a row. I never see that during the day.
I for one welcome our new human overlords.
Lemm.ee and @sunaurus@lemm.ee have been rocking it from day 1. You take good care of your community, Ty.
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.
Fine by me. I’ve already blocked a few bot accounts that were spam posting
Bots should not be responsible for the majority of content in any community
I think this could maybe be qualified a little bit. I think of communities like /r/news or /r/worldnews, and they are quite largely just links from other news sources, that are then discussed, and they’re a type of community I myself really valued from reddit, before moving here.
I don’t think the argument is fair that you should just use RSS if you want aggregation, communities focused on “link aggregation” (which is what Lemmy is on paper, is it not? a “link aggregator”?) provide SO much more. Off the top of my head, communities and community discussion can bypass paywalls, identify misleading headlines, point out related stories or context… I don’t see the problem with communities like this having links seeded by bots. One could argue it actually helps fight bias.
I am 100% on board with ditching all the reddit-scraping bots. Reddit posts are not primary sources of anything.
Completely agree with you, some slight difference should be applied to this rule to state clearly what should be avoided and what is valuable.
It seems lemm.ee is not at a scale yet where we can allow even such useful bots without overloading our local feeds with bot posts. I am sure we can re-evaluate this if activity continues to grow, though.
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.
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!
Thank you again. I’ve had some issues with bots taking over my feeds. Zero engagement bots dont seem to have a place though I can understand the appeal of them for archiving.
EDIT: I guess I hadn’t looked for more webcomic communities in a while and there are more available now which have people actually posting OC to instead of just reposting from elsewhere with no discussion. I’ll leave my original comment below regardless.
I’m of mixed opinion about this. I only subscribe to one bot-led community (!comics@lemmit.online) and whilst I hate that every comic is just reposted from Reddit by the bot and so has no comments or discussion, it seems that no comic creators are posting to Lemmy yet and so I would rather still be able to see the content they are creating than miss it entirely. I understand that both the community and the bot are hosted on lemmit.online so they won’t be affected by the bot policy of lemm.ee but it still speaks to the problem of lack of content posted to Lemmy in general (at least in certain communities).
sounds good
Repost bots need to be regulated in volume. Otherwise this instance becomes an aggregator, and we already have RSS for that.
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).