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!
If you browse lemm.ee not logged in at the time of this comment all you see are pages of bots reposting reddit threads. There’s no way anyone that sees that decides “oh this place is cool, I’m going to sign up”.
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First bot I blocked.
When I see a community that is all bot generated content from Reddit, it’s an instablock for me. Thanks for cracking down.
I’m all for pretty much all of these changes. The only thing I’d give feedback on is specifically this line.
Bots should not have a disruptive influence on a community
I think this needs a clear definition, before I can say that I agree with that.
Just my thoughts.
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.
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.
Repost bots need to be regulated in volume. Otherwise this instance becomes an aggregator, and we already have RSS for that.
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.
Honestly, i love and hate the alternate youtube frontend bot, i love that it links to a better client bit it does clutter things up. I would love if it was brief and stuck its explanation on its website or a spoiler, the bot takes up as mutch text is this paragraph just to give you the link,
mockup of a better post style
Here are privicy respecting ways of viewing this media
Where it puts the relivant sentences into quotes and replaces the links with privicy respecting ones, also should not notify users of a new message, that requires a change to lemmy api
We really should add a “dont contribute to metrics” and “metrics meed to be above X to be shown in Y” option applyabe to your posts or via the API
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?
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.
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
Lemm.ee and @sunaurus@lemm.ee have been rocking it from day 1. You take good care of your community, Ty.
As almost everybody seems to agree (with regards to the comments on this post), why don’t you simply state that reddit repost bots are forbidden on this instance and not generalize to each and every bot while there can be some useful use-case for news, aggregation from other Lemmy communities or so… I have the feeling that talking about reddit related stuff become a bit the elephant in the room…
Well, the most reported bot at the moment is not a Reddit repost bot at all. We would like to solve the issue on a more general level at the moment - by limiting volume of bot content in relation to organic user-created content.
Seems fair, understood the objective and the fact you’re not closed to change your mind later. If you have no plans to defederate with instance hosting boys I think it’s not a bad thing to have instances for bots and other for human users only…
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.
I’m excited to see less bots.
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You would have amore meaningful time facing two TVs together and leaving the building, then a community full of nothing but bots. It’s a waste of a community, data, and servers.
Personally I don’t like replying to bots. It feels like talking to a wall. There is no real person behind the bot account I’m replying to and I will never have a discussion with this account. Isn’t having discussions the point of social media though? Otherwise I could just read my RSS feeds …
I’ve therefore selected to not show me bot posts on Lemmy and try to hide bots from Mastodon by filtering for keywords, such as “bot” or “twitter feed”, in profiles.
If the community is nothing but bots then it’s still a dead community, though.
I agree. I noticed a community mentioned above that was nothing but bot posts from YouTube. The community name did have YouTube in the name, but there were no comments on any post that I saw. A community that is just bots reposting information, possibly in random fashion, is not really a community, because no one is communing with another human or with a bot.
Yeah that YouTube repost bot is the worst offender imo. Crowds the local feed and brings nothing to the table, blocked it was soon as it inconvenienced me from reading actual stuff here on Lemmy
