About using bots on lemmy.today
There has been quite a few reports lately about people using bots and llms to create and upvote content. I wanted to make a post to discuss this.
In my opinion, bots are a tool to quickly create or repost content. And its how users use that tool that is important for whether or not it will make lemmy a better or worse place.
Two examples:
User A
- User A frequently visits reddit and would like to quickly share content that he thinks is actually good and would be liked on lemmy.
- He uses a bot or some other tool to do this quickly and conveniently.
- Most of the posts are generally liked by the community, sometimes ending up on the frontpage, with many comments from many different users.
- A few users are complaining about bot content but the majority seems to appreciate the posts.
User B
- User B also uses a similar repost bot or a llm to generate content, but they decide that lemmy needs a lot of content and it doesnt matter so much weather or not its actually good.
- The main idea is to repost or generate as much as possible and lets users decide what they like.
- They create 30 posts in a day, where almost none of them are actually interesting for the lemmy community. Posts have no comments, and most of them are only upvoted by other bot users.
- Many users are complaining that they now see tons of low quality posts in their feeds because of this user.
How will we moderate this
In my mind, the lemmy community is fine with user A but not user B. So it requires moderators to make a decision about the content someone is creating. Does it make lemmy better or worse for the majority?
Thats how Im thinking about this, and if you want to share your own ideas or comments, I would love reading them. If you agree, easiest way is to upvote. If you dont, I would love a comment even more so I can understand some other point of view. :)
Thanks!
I personally rarely if ever reply to a bot post, the bot does not give a shit about my thought.
Yes but sanitation is not a bot and he reads the comments. He is just using an automated tool. So what do you call that kind of a user? Automated tool user?
He may read them, but with something like an 11:1 post to comment ratio, be does not engage with his content, just like a bot. So i call that kind of user a content farmer.
So there is an empty community. Would u rather it stay empty? Or have some semi-automatic reposting of highly upvoted reddit content until enough community members can post content organically?
Look at it as a CEO - how would you make a community popular without content? Do you expect someone to just come in and do that work? Just 10 people a day magically show up? Is it just benign naivity or something more sinister at play here? And why would you say it didn't happen yet after all the evil things reddit done? Why didn't people flood lemmy and started creating content?
These are the numbers:
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% participate, and 1% create.
In order to build a community you need a 1000 users a day with 10 maybe posting something - you will never get there if as you suggest we are to just wait and hope and pray for people to just show up one day in a dead community.
I would rather that whoever fills the community flags their account as a bot if they are using automated methods.
It's not about the content it's about the account doing the posting. If the account is automated that affects how and whether I engage with their posts. Maybe it doesn't affect you but it does affect me and many others.
Lemmy has functionality to do with this, for good reasons.
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% participate, and 1% create.
I think the majority of lemmy uses are either completely oblivious to this, or there is a reddit influence operation as the end result is de-contenting mostly works in reddit favor as most people will see no content and go back to reddit.