Lemmy Today

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!