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!
Why post them at all if not starting an actual conversation?
I have to agree with sanitation here. If there is a tool to repost good content to lemmy, there is little reason to force someone to do it manually. It will only create friction. On the other hand, we want to avoid 1000's of low quality posts. So its not the tool that is the problem I think - its how its used.
It's nominal friction for a good reason. A post without comment is, largely, a low quality post regardless of the quality of the source information. It's the equivalent of just walking Wikipedia and creating a post for each page. The content itself may be fine, but why repost it without comment? What is the value? I can go to Wikipedia to find their information... I don't need it reposted here without comment. I'd much rather see quality over quantity. I'd rather see a low quality post with lots of engagement than a high quality post with none.
I only repost high quality reddit content into communities I'm interested in. It has to have 100 reddit upvotes minimum.
This flow guarantees this content is already vetted, well received and generally guaranteed interesting and of a high quality.
Nobody owes you comments. I post comments whenever I feel like posting comments, it's a free country.
Look that's the issue - when I came to lemmy I just wanted to comment and not create content, and there was simply no content where I can comment at, no posts - that's the main reason I started posting
If I wanted to read Reddit, then I would... I don't understand the desire to turn Lemmy into Reddit.
I have no problem with reddit content, majority of users just want reddit without being forced to be on reddit.com.
why do you believe lemmy is any different than decentralized reddit?
A lot of people, myself included, came here to get away from reddit. I'm far more interested in quality posts with conversation than a million posts with no activity.
But you're conflating Reddit the platform with content that happens to appear on Reddit.
I came here to get away from Reddit too. That doesn't mean an interesting article, meme, video, or discussion suddenly becomes garbage because somebody posted it on Reddit first.
And I agree that conversation is the goal. But conversation needs something to be about. Most users consume, fewer comment, and very very very few submit posts.
I'm not arguing for a million garbage posts. I'm arguing for curated, relevant posts that give otherwise quiet communities something to talk about.
If a post is bad, downvote it. If it's good and starts a conversation, why should anyone care where it was discovered?
It's just down to preference... I don't like scrolling through page after page of posts with no comments on them. They're just a waste of time and space. That it was/wasn't posted on reddit isn't an issue. The idea of 'farming' Reddit and cross-posting their high rated posts is the problem. I literally block every community I come across where I find that it's just a reddit feed.
That's fair. If you hate that kind of feed, blocking it makes sense. But you're one of the people who stayed. Lemmy has had roughly 750k accounts registered, while only around 35k are active monthly. That's a massive gap.
We don't hear from the hundreds of thousands who tried Lemmy and disappeared. Maybe a lot of them opened communities, saw barely any content, and went back to Reddit.
That's who I'm trying to reach. The people who already love Lemmy don't need convincing.
Yeah... we can only speculate with no way to ask them. I would counter with, maybe the saw all same crap they saw on Reddit (but, with fewer comments), so why move?
I suppose that at the end of the day it comes down to each community deciding what they want... if they want to require comments by posters, then they could.
Thank you for the civil discussion...
Yeah, we can only speculate. But I think there's a big distinction between liking Reddit's content and wanting to use Reddit as a platform. Im fine with content on reddit, I dont like reddit as a platform, becaues:
imo this doesnt mean reddit content is bad (actual links, memes, news, videos etc) - imo they are fine by enlarge.
That's what I want from Lemmy: the good parts of Reddit without having to use Reddit.
And yeah, ultimately individual communities should decide what they want. Normal people can disagree and still have a civil conversation. I appreciate that we can sometimes to do exactly that.
you have 0 posts in 6 months.
you are the problem.
thats the kind of people that are trying to ban others from posting.
Don't be an asshole. I participate quite frequently which is way more important than some artificial post count. I'm not asking to ban any person. I'm saying that one should simply be required to manually create their posts AND comment on them so that we don't just get tons of drive by posts that are just artificial attention whoring.
Attention whoring for what? What would even be the benefit? This is lemmy there is no ads, no monetization angle.
This is the numbers I want you guys to understand 90–9–1 rule:
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% participate, and 1% create.
I create posts so 99% of others have something to do. Otherwise it's just a dead community.
Competing with ragebait and propaganda from other sources discourages real organic posts. We didn't come here for that shit
I don't know why people think lemmy is any different than the defederated reddit.
Any social platform that managed to attract enough users will just be mostly recycling content. Anything u see on Facebook will eventually pop up on reddit or x. It's all the same