Comment on Why are there so many bots all lemmy?
Decoy321@lemmy.world 1 year agoThat’s entirely understandable. That’s the thing, though. It’s hard to have a community grow on its own, organically, in these times. A large majority of users are rather passive, they don’t actively contribute by posting or commenting so much. If they don’t get enough content on a topic/community, they’ll forget it exists.
So, to build a community, you get a bot to “seed” it with content until enough people know it exists and contribute stuff themselves.
It’s weird and fucked and, unfortunately, it’s the world we live in now.
kd637_mi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I disagree, it just leads to spam and people blocking the bots, and therefore the communities. I think things will grow organically at whatever speed. People have to realise this isn’t Reddit, and likely won’t ever be as big, and that it’s good that it won’t be.
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Yes, I’ve blocked a number of start up communities because they’ve flooded my feed with posts. Some of them even seemed interesting and I subscribed…only to immediately unsubscribe and block after seeing it has 10 posts an hour with 0 engagement.
eee@lemm.ee 1 year ago
No it won’t. Social networks require a critical mass to get started. It’s why platforms like Uber throw money at drivers and consumers at the start - without a critical mass, it won’t work. Spez and his team had conversations with each other using sock puppet accounts during the early days of Reddit.
kd637_mi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Fair enough, I feel that there are enough people on Lemmy now that it is past the getting started phase though. If new people come on and see bot after bot I feel that it will be a worse experience than having fewer communities with organic engagement.