Low Effort Bot Content

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Master@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨meta@lemm.ee⁩

Ok, so I get that there are two views on the success of Lemmy. 1, more content = more views = more users signing up. 2, Quality content = more views = more users signing up.

I’m firmly in the #2 category myself but I understand the viewpoint of #1 even if I dont agree with it. For some people #1 might cause them to sign up…

But I dont see how low effort bots creating useless content for content sake is beneficial to this community at all.

Take this link for example… lemm.ee/c/youtube_feed

There are hundreds of posts by a youtube crawling bot that just seems to be posting random youtube video links and adding the video title as the post description. Only a handful of the two hundred videos posted have any comments and those are just 1-2 people saying this is useless content.

Now before anyone jumps in and says, you can just block the bot, or block the community or…

Yes I could and I will be. But the problem is when someone new comes to lemmy and randomly selects lemm.ee they are going to be inundated with with these low effort no replay video posts and walk away back to reddit.

I dont know the solution to this either. Obviously someone wants this content since they spent the time to set up a bot and a community and etc. But for the life of me I cant understand why that person wants it.

The stats for the community are interesting too.

185 posts, 28 subscribers (probably 28 repost bots) and 4 comments. **4 ** COMMENTS!

Obviously I’m going to block the community from my feed but It makes for a really bad first time user experience when these bot communities with no interactions are populating the default feed for all new users and guests… Again, I dont know the solution to this either… but it’s definitely a problem.

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Comments

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JudahBenHur@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
i blocked and reported the bot. its the definition of digital garbage

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CommunityLinkFixer@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !youtube_feed@lemm.ee

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- Master@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  No, because I dont want people to actually go to the link and get cancer…
  
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sunaurus@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
First of all, I have made a small change to Lemmy to allow instance admins to set the default feed for new users. The default feed for all new lemm.ee users is actually “All” now!

I think over time, the local feed will probably improve as well for those who are interested in it, but for now “All” seems to be a much safer choice.

As for bots that just mass-post content - I am personally not a fan of them. Maybe it indeed makes sense to tune the algorithm to value bot content less that real human content (at least by a little). I will monitor the situation for a while and try to come up with some ideas.

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- BoozeOrWater@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Thank you for your work!
  
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WarmSoda@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
When I see a community that only has bot submissions at first glance i immediately leave. It doesn’t matter if the bot just started posting ten minutes ago and the rest of the posts are from people, if the first page is all bot spam I scram.

I’ve noticed a lot of bot authors get extremely defensive and rude when anyone comments on their bot, too. Obviously not every author, but most have that I’ve seen. How are bots a good thing if the people behind them act like that?

Basically I feel like there’s no reason to comment in a bot post. OP isn’t going to respond, it’s a bot it doesn’t even know what it’s posting. People will comment though not realizing it’s bot and they’ll ask questions expecting it to be a person and reply back. That’s not a good way to build social groups in my opinion.

How many people enjoyed gallowbob post spam on Reddit? That’s all these bots are. Gallowbots.

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jiaerene@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
yeah these repost bots are super annoying and not something I was really running into when I was on kbin - I made a lemm.ee account finally yesterday and was so confused on the amount of bot content in my feed 😖

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thethongthatthings@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
At some point Lemmy will be big enough that these no-comment posts will just drop off the frontpages, right?

If you open reddit and choose All and new you also get a lot of junk.

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- Master@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I agree on principal but right now lemmy doest work that way. If I go to lemm.ee and select local, top 12 hours 5 posts on that first page are from this youtube bot / community. If I go to page 2 17 of the posts are from this bot / community. Page 3 has 11 posts from them. This goes on for page after page until you hit the end of Top 12 hours.
  
  Not a single one of those has any comments either. So I’m not sure how this is “top” except for the fact that they all have 3 upvotes (probably from upvote bots)
  
  It’s a problem and a misrepresentation of lemmy to new users.
  
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PeleSpirit@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think they’re working on the algorithm to combat these things, but I agree with you. Reposting for content like actual people are doing with the memes is great imo, but what you’re talking about needs to go. AITA on lemmy.world had a go at it and they stopped the bot for that very reason. I think their intentions were good but it just didn’t work out, probably the same with the yoututube place.

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- WarmSoda@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I think it’s hilarious someone thought a bot asking if it’s the asshole a hundred times in a row was a good idea
  
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