For example: Funzobot, News bot, and Finance bot.
I am not a fan. I don’t like link dumps. It doesn’t create a discussion and the article or whatever is being relayed might be total shit and there could be better or more direct sources.
If I saw a Hackaday article about a neat project on GitHub I wouldn’t just post the article with the original title. I would probably link the GitHub page and in the body of the post link the article with a quote and maybe post similar projects in case people are interested.
I specifically dislike the bots that repost content from Reddit. The communities they post to feel fake and end up receiving so many posts actual Lemmy users posting to them get washed away in the flood.
It’s not a big deal for some communities (ex. Nature photos) but doesn’t make sense for discussion focused ones.
I block those bots
Not once have I encountered one. I don’t mind them, though
I think this sufficiently sums up my take:
The fact that that’s an option at all makes Lemmy considerably better than Reddit.
Problem is it requires bot runners to be honest.
You can probably get your instance admin to ban any bot accounts that aren’t being honest, which is also a step up for Reddit.
how do we distinguish bots from real accounts?
Can bots respond to direct messages or replies?
In theory you can write scripts with Selenium to do anything a regular user would do. Most bots have limits but it’s always possible to basically write scripts that virtually click buttons, write content, post content, etc.
If we want to, how do we disincentive them?
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As soon as I see a few posts from a bot in a row, I block it
I haven’t seen a bot in a long long time here.
I just block them on sigth, especially the one made by people that think we want RSS feeds.
I like the news bots as I’m thinking a lot of content wouldn’t be posted without them. That being said, would prefer more human engagement, but we’ll get there!
Doesn’t bother me. You can always block them individually like users if they are cluttering up your feed.
Annoying as shit
I have bot accounts blocked in the user settings. Bots can’t laugh at my jokes.
I blocked one of them. I want humans.
Good now, bad later.
Lemmy is small enough to only have useful bots now. Naively, I think policing bot content across instances will grow into a nightmare the day that policing is needed.
I turned on the option to hide bots so I don’t see them.
I wish there was an option to turn off link-only posts. At least have something in the body of the post. Maybe a quote or a TLDR. Otherwise it just feels like a bot posting.
When I used imgur, it had 2 bots, this time last year and a repost detecting bot. I thought that was useful, and the userbase over time got sick of the repost one.
When I used reddit, with all of the different subreddits, every dork on there felt like they needed to create a bot for any niche or joke but they made it opt out, instead of in. That was excessive and i found it annoying.
I hope Lemmy stays closer to the first example, or no bots at all.
