There is no reason for a bot to be able to access or post on federated social networks if the goal is to make social media humane.
For this reason, bots should be heavily disallowed from posting content to or accessing content from federated social media.
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A bot that posts sports team scores to a sports community? Sure, I guess. A bot that reports popular reddit posts? No way.
Some content bots make sense, but in a very narrow scope.
Why do you have to be so hurtful
Read the username, folks. Context is key
Hehe, sometimes people get the joke sometimes they don’t:)
I feel like we’re being followed (consistent single downvote…). Wait for it ;)
It’s probably a KGB_chatbot.
Een Soviet Rrrusia, chatbot question yoü!
If you have to explain the joke it wasn’t funny
some subreddits were basically bots posting new topical research papers, which i appreciated.
While I see the merit, I digress, I don’t think any bots should be allowed for non-admin users.
I also want less bot posts in my communities, but what’s wrong about a bot that posts sports team scores to a sports community?
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What’s wrong that is for that bot to exist, the platform must explicitly allow other bots to also exist for fairness sake, it’s a bot floodgate. I think the floodgate should be vehemently shut latched and bolted down sooner than later, and I already think it’s too late.
the platform must explicitly allow other bots to also exist for fairness sake
With platform, you mean instance or community? They can have arbitrary rules and don’t have to be fair. One could say only this specific bot is allowed which we currently use, another could disallow bots unless whitelisted by the mods, or whatever.
Or do I miss a technical aspect?
Unless this becomes a standard for the fediverse. I’m going to opt-out of fediverse social media altogether. Bots have no place in human based social media : full-stop.
I understood this is the opinion and the request, but still don’t know what harm would be caused by a bot that posts sports team scores to a sports community? Assumed unwanted further bot influx is prevented. The ‘why’ is unclear for me in this case.
The API access for bots allows for other people to access that API and make bots that do other things. You are opening the floodgates to other bots because there isn’t quite the ability to say “only sports bots who post legitmate scores at times when there are real games occurring can post automatically” you see, that is not going to happen, thereby opening the floodgates to all other bots with no recourse.
Or you can just block them.
Why allow bots, marketing assholes, and spammers the platform to post and spam to the fediverse? Why? IT really achieves nothing of value and literally just dilutes real, original user activity and discussion.
there’s an option in your settings to hide bots, just use that
Man, harsh
L4s, who I believe is a bot, posts to this community regularly.
Assuming the content is generally high quality I don’t have a problem with it.
If it’s bad, the community votes it away, if it’s good, the community votes it higher.
The core of social media in my view is the discussion, we can have a discussion even if a bot posts the discussion topic.
We should set rules, sure, but I don’t have a problem with bots inherently.
I can understand this take; I realize it probably boils down to personal preference, but seeing the mod bot with 2 of the top posts of the last 6 hours just feels like a bad look for a community to me. It’s stated purpose:
I’m a bot designed to increase content created on Lemmy, to try and jump-start communities, and make Lemmy overall a more enjoyable place
This is a relatively active community, and I don’t think it really needs to be “jump started” anymore. Let humans post the content. That’s what I want to see and engage with. I still think there is a place for bot posts, but with a much more limited scope (episode discussion threads, sports scores as was mentioned elsewhere, etc.). Nothing turns me off a community faster than seeing half the top post from a bot.
As a thought, I wonder how you’d feel if the bot account wasn’t clearly identified as a bot.
Using Voyager (wefwef) I can’t tell. So to me it’s just another account. It’s not in my face, it isn’t obvious, and most of the time I have no idea who posted anything. I see the title, I vote accordingly (or just move on), if it’s interesting I look at the comments.
To be clear bot accounts should 100% identify themselves as bots, but I wonder if making it too obvious is making them stand out too much.
(And of course if I saw “Bot” everywhere I might have a different opinion.)
That’s a good point. If I didn’t see that they were bot accounts it would probably be an ignorance-is-bliss situation. I just wouldn’t notice. Though, using desktop, it’s fairly obvious since most have the “b” next to their names that also include “bot”.
A lot of the time, you’ll see OP engage in the comments of what they post because they themselves have a personal interest in it. You don’t get that with bots. I have to wonder if bots are denying humans that chance. Someone goes to post something they found, but the reddit repost bot already pulled it from some subreddit’s new feed.
“Stealing” posts is a good argument against bots as well. As a user if, every time I went to post, my post was already “taken” then I’d be less likely to post in the future.
Although technically that’s true even without bots.
I do think limiting in general how often any one account can post makes sense, so I would extend that same rule to bots.
For “good” bots we could even request that they wait 24 hours before posting something new. (Of course if the rules are too strict we’ll just have bad bots and that defeats the point of having bot rules.)
I can’t stand L4s. Being provided content from a bot is not engaging at all. I’m tired of seeing the majority of post generated by L4s.
What is the difference between a bot posting and a user posting? Both are posting an article. Both are using the title of the article.
It’s not like the bot is posting constantly.
What is the bot doing that makes them less engaging?
If they didn’t mark themselves as a bot you’d have no idea.
Often a user is interested and knowledgeable in the topic they’ve posted and will reply to comments, creating dialogue and new content.
Now that is an interesting point and definitely a point against bots. Ultimately I think it’s still OK for them to post, but you’re right that a genuine seed conversation can be helpful to get the whole post started.
I know in Reddit times some subs required a submission statement and that was a positive. I think if such a rule were adopted I’d be ok with limiting bot posts.
There is a poll that I think is still running to vote about whether to keep the bot or not: !https://lemmy.world/post/1794808
What’s an L4?
That leads me to another topic, I disagree. You know scientists always trying to make things happen but never asking if they “Should”?
That’s how I feel about “good” bot content, where, sure, a bot can post something that generates a novel human discussion, but I think this is also inherently bad and is as close as you can get to providing a “turn-key community brainwash application” to anyone who wants it.
IE: the bot posts good stuff, we all pat the bot on the back with upvotes because it wasn’t horrible, but then we trust the bot, people trust the bot, then there is no way for us to know if the bot is compromised, what if the bot is compromised, and is slowly but surely, algorithmically recommending content to divide and confuse, FUD, etc…
This is my concern, and lambast me for paranoia, but I’m not wrong, and this is one reason reddit went down the shithole.
I mean humans run bots. So you’re ok with all those things you said as long as a human posts it?
Bots follow the same rules as humans. I’m happy to discuss rules for all types of posting. Once we agree then bots follow the same rules.
The truth is if you ban bots, bots are just going to pretend to be human. Even if you allow bots, some will pretend to be human. As long as everyone is following the rules, we’ll be fine.
Humans literally run bots to do things that they wouldn’t/couldn’t/or shouldn’t DO. Your logic is beyond reproach.
What? Bots automate what humans would, could or should (or more accurately want) to do.
No one, literally no one, thinks “Oh, I should do something terrible, but I can’t, but if a bot does it then it’s fine.”
Bots are just an extension of what humans already want to do. If a bot is designed to be “good” then it is, if it is designed to be “bad” then it’s bad.
Okay so then, if a human wants to post score of every sports game to a community, they can’t unless they practice the discipline in doing so. A bot removes the human limitation and allow them to do something that is not possible otherwise, and I believe the end result is content that is removed from the humanity behind it in the first place. A self-defeating prophecy that spells my disinterest and permanent doom for fediverse – I can’t stand this place and the ignorance regarding sensitive topics and the disdain to change.
Just so we’re on the same page, bots are here and are going to post.
You can make a rule that bots can not post, but bots will still post. They won’t be labeled as bots and you’ll have to spend all of your time investigating every account. For all you know I’m a bot and for all I know you’re a bot.
Also it is absolutely possible for a human to post the score to every game. When I watch a TV show I come to lemmy to discuss it. When I get here it is already posted. If it wasn’t I could post it.
On Reddit some subs would have a bot post it. On some small subs the bot would break. Users would still post a thread. Discussion would still happen.
The advantage of having a bot post is that bots are organized, bots are predictable, bots make it easier. Bots are just a tool. Bots can be a positive tool.
Also, since I have no idea what you’re talking about in regards to ignorance, sensitive topics and change. When I posted my comment this post was full of circlejerk “no bots ever” comments and that’s it. I have a different opinion. I’m happy to discuss that opinion. We are allowed to disagree. If you can’t have a reasonable discussion I don’t give a shit if you stay on the Fediverse or not.
You know scientists always trying to make things happen but never asking if they “Should”?
I’ve never seen someone use this as an argument, only as a joke. Can you provide some examples of the things that you think scientists tried to make happen without thinking whether they should or not?
Also, how is user-specific trust at play here? I never even look at usernames, instead I will upvote or ignore posts based on their content. I don’t think you can really ease Lemmy/kbin users into believing some divisive nonsense that easily.
Macho Man Randy Savage is the cream of the crop. https://youtu.be/8C4lK41SX-Q
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/8C4lK41SX-Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Ironic lmfao
And perfectly demonstrates the flaw in OPs reasoning.
If you need a bot to convert links for you, you don’t have a brain.
And the cream ALWAYS rises to the top
he’s always Tryin’ to play me out like as if my name was Sega
Mean Genes ability to stay straight faced was amazing, how can you stand there next to Macho Man Randy Savage, while he pulls a bunch of creamer cups from his pocket and saying the insane but entertaining af shit he says.
Two GOATS showing people how it’s done.
That’s what I immediately thought of, bravo.
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This is not even remotely accurate.
If that were the case they would just revert to the old version, it doesn’t need to be constantly trained.
Given that the API version hasn’t changed, it’s most likely the just scaled down the compute allocated to the free chat version.
Two examples of bots I have found helpful in the past:
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A bot that takes book names and gives the description and author (and maybe a link to goodreads or other)
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a bot that takes Lego numbers people posts and gives the name and link
The bot that can set reminders (though I don’t know if it worked)
the one that tells you if your comment is in alphabetical order
The bot that ranked other bots
Wasn’t there an xkcd-ass bot?
The tldr bots were awesome
A bot that masquerades as a regular user and posts paid marketing content once a month
A bot that posts political articles with tailored sensational/biased headlines
A bot that records all activity on an instance and creates a topological graph of the activity tied to users and the content they interact with
A bot that posts a picture of cat, a picture that anyone can fucking google or something that nobody needs or asked for
Who fucking cares if you can come up with harmless “good” uses for bots… they always come with the bad.
Sounds a lot like people.
That third bot sounds really cool honestly. Possible privacy concerns, but not necessarily.
That 3rd bot is intentionally a direct reference to NSA PRISM
- a bot that redorects youtube to piped
Who really cares about that
As long as it isn’t the shakespeare bot, it’s negotiable
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Surely you understand that “disallowed” and “federated” are mutually exclusive, no?
Block and move on. Maybe pick an instance that doesn’t allow them. If they’re useless then it won’t make much of a difference.
You could have just as easily ignored this post and moved on… why post if you think this is all just personal preference?
NO, it’s not just preference, bots lower the quality of the community, and it’s easily observed.
I don’t think it’s a narrow scope at all, it just shouldn’t infringe on the territory of users
Launch alerts, RSS feeds, version releases, a of interesting communities could be based around bot posts.
Not reposts for sure though, and if we’re going to do stuff like pipedbot I’d prefer it be summoned. But in general it’d be fun if we made them weird and creative, but they should be doing things only bots can do
I agree that original content is the cream we need, but we shouldn’t throw out the rest of the milk while we’re still hungry (for content).
Its almost like a single saying cannot be used to void an entire industry.
Outside of mod tools pretty much no reason for them.
That’s my understanding as well, I think a hardline on this topic that can be agreed upon as a federation standard will work wonders to curb potential spam and bot abuse in the future.
L4s (the main content posting bot) is run by the admin of the community tho. Also there’s a post with a poll about the bot: https://lemmy.world/post/1794808
Thanks, didn’t know that. The question I have now, is why did the admin implement that in the first place? Overwhelming response of " The content bot should be removed entirely. 39.02% (48 votes)" the closest has 17% of “it should post less articles”.
It’s 48 against versus 58 for keeping the bot (and 20 votes abstaining), where against is “the bot should be removed” and keeping is either keeping the bot as-is or modifying it slightly.
Why are you telling me this? I don’t care that you think you’re adding value by summing totals of a poll for me. That isn’t a convenience, that’s an irritant.
Because you seemingly misunderstood the results of the poll. Your post implied an “overwhelming response” that were against keeping the bot, when the actual results were a majority of keeping the bot around.
https://lemmy.world/post/805180
Well, time to bring out this post again.
Lemmy has a setting to hide bot posts
Account settings > disable “show bot accounts”
I think the harm caused by bots affects the whole community and culture, that is why I hope other people will see that a community without bots would actually create a preferable culture and would increase the demand for good quality content.
I have yet to come across a bot I truly appreciate and find indispensable, here or on FuckSpez.com
I block every one I see, without exception.
Why not just go into your settings is hide posts from bots? I feel like that’d be easier than blocking every bot individually.
You can just hide posts from bots if you do not like them. Settings -> Uncheck “Show Bot Accounts.” I’m not sure what the point of this post is.
Some people find use out of them, hence bots being allowed here with an option to easily hide them.
Also, OC is not the cream of the crop. There’s plenty of terrible posts out there written by humans, as demonstrated by many folks on this platform. I can say that I occasionally get more use out of a bot’s post than a human’s post.
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Agreed, I quit my browser when I encounter that sense that I’ve read this or heard this already… that sensation is happening more and more frequently and so far, the fediverse has been a huge let down for me personally. I was hoping for a return to sense and humble origins of what made reddit good, instead people are literally just emulating reddit 2019 culture on the fediverse and it gives me extremely senior “get off my lawn” vibes.
