Every day I am noticing more and posts by bots.

At first it didn’t bother me as I thought bot posting may incentivate people to comment but since this rarely happens and now I think they are just polluting the communities.

I know I can filter them but I wonder what is the general sentiment about this.

  • Sooperstition@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Not a huge fan of the reddit repost bots when we can steal content the old fashioned way by right-clicking!

  • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I really dislike them.

    I thought bot posting may incentivate people to comment

    When a bot posts the same gardian link to every news community and then do the same thing for the next article, it kills any chance for comment as the poster is never present in the thread. Example: soyagi@yiffit.net

    Many are low grade scams. Example: This user screams scammer to me chouaty1@kbin.social

    Others are just marketing spam. Example: This user is just a marketing bot posting over and over links to the same site. raven3312@kbin.social

    • starlinguk@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I wish actual humans would also stop reposting shit. Karma farming is not necessary on Lemmy or Kbin.

      • El Barto@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There is no karma on Lemmy, though. So they are appealing to good ol’fashioned spamming.

        • fkn@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I mean… There is… It’s just hidden by the default UI. It’s exposed in voyager… You have 904 comment karma for example (and no post karma).

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Bots posting news articles is fine IMO. It prompts discussion in the comments. Most news articles posted on Reddit came from bots too.

    • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think it just gets annoying when you see bots posting the same article across multiple communities, or worse, other bots reposting the same story a few days later. I don’t want to keep scrolling past the same story for a week straight.

  • chairman@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I am ok with bots as long as:

    1. The posts are labelled clearly as such that it’s posted by a bot

    2. The account itself has some clear indication that it’s a bot

    By fulfilling this requirements, everyone can decide I’d they want to see these posts or block them.

    *** I block some bots…

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Disagree with your first point. If the account itself is labelled as a bot then that’s good enough. I’m mostly on Jerboa and it adds an icon next to bot accounts’ usernames.

      • fkn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s literally their first point. How do you disagree with it when you have and use it? What?

        • eric@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The distinction you are missing is indicating the post is from a bot rather than indicating the account is a bot. The difference in that distinction is that many Lemmy readers will not indicate anywhere on a post that it is from a bot simply because the account is labeled as a bot.

  • elxeno@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I block all post bots, i think they’re useless. Those on comments are fine, like the remindme, piped, link fixer, chatgpt, etc.

      • Custoslibera@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s a joke my friend.

        And unfortunately like a frog in biology class when I dissect the joke it’s going to die, so here we go:

        Parent comment made it sound like it was very basic knowledge of Lemmy to block bots and because I didn’t want to appear dumb I added the ‘for a friend’ even though I intended that it was obvious I was asking for myself.

        The failed attempt at misdirection should have been humorous.

        • El Barto@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Oh I know it’s a joke. But now that we’re here dissecting it (don’t take me too seriously :) ):

          The problem with the “don’t want to appear dumb” premise is that if your friend is asking, and it’s common knowledge, then you can simply give the answer to your friend because you’re supposed to know the answer already. There is no need to “ask for a friend.”

          With porn, though, the premise is not lack of knowledge, but to appear nice and clean. If you ask directly “hey what’s the link to that ass-to-elbow video?” you’ll feel ashamed. But if “your friend” is asking, then hey, you’re just the messenger.

          Anyway. That was fun to type!

  • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    It’s really annoying when bots steal content from smaller subs where the OP is asking an actual question. I know there is a good chance OP won’t see the answers given anyways, but at least there is a chance when posting in the original thread. With a repost bot, there is 0 chance OP will see the answer. Why would I want to engage with that? It’s a total waste of time.

    Also repost bots were the scourge of Reddit, I actively blocked a lot of subreddits because they were mostly repost bots. With the lack of karma on Lemmy, I hoped the bots would stay away. But alas, it is not so.

    I also hate the obsession with Reddit on Lemmy. People have said before, it’s like going on a date and talking about your ex the whole time. Stop talking about Reddit, don’t setup bots to blindly repost shit and forget about the whole thing.

    We need to make Lemmy a success by making it an engaging place, with good content and good people. So get to posting, voting and commenting.

    There are actual good bots, but they don’t usually post, only comment. The TL;DR bot is a real nice feature to have, especially when the source is a news site with so much ads and crap I can’t read the article. Reddit repost bots should be banned imho.

  • Levsgetso@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    I don’t really like them, my feed is now polluted by bots. I’ve already blocked one that reposts Reddit content and I’ll probably beging blocking more of them

  • hitagi (ani.social)@ani.social
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    1 year ago

    I know repost bots help “fill in” the lack of user activity for some communities but it ends up feeling empty anyway. I think posts (and reposts) should be curated (in a sense) by users. Bots should assist users in creating content, not creating content themselves.

    • papajohn@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It feels like a waste of my time engaging in a port the seeing its a bot after I started a comment. I always delete a d move along. I guess I should just block them.

  • bstix@feddit.dk
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    1 year ago

    I think the bots for news makes sense.

    I don’t particularly like all the link fixers and stuff like that in the comments. It’s mostly noise, even if the intention is good.

    • Mereo@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      The problem is that they often repost news that has already been posted in the community. It gets quite annoying.

      • bstix@feddit.dk
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        1 year ago

        I don’t see that a lot, because I’m only subscribed to the most populated communities whenever there are multiple.

        Anyway, I don’t know much about bot programming, but it seems possible to make the bot check the community for similar URLs in the last couple of days so it could skip the ones already posted.

  • maegul (he/they)
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    1 year ago

    I wonder if the bots that are making their own posts (such as the hacker news and reddit X-post bots) should be limited to their own communities. If you want them in your feed, subscribe, otherwise, everyone is ignoring them by default.

    !hackernews@derp.foo works that way and I think it’s working well so far.