Lemmy Today

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mrmanager@lemmy.today

About using bots on lemmy.today (lemmy.today)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by mrmanager@lemmy.today to c/lemmytoday@lemmy.today

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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!

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[–] mrmanager@lemmy.today 3 points 4 days ago

Tal, you get the longest comment award for this one, congratulations. :)

But I think that over time, it’s going to become increasingly impractical to identify all content that has been synthesized.

For sure, 100%. Its only a matter of time before we cant tell anymore.

The real concern I have with bots is organized influence campaigns. Trying to sell a product or affect opinions of a politician or country or whatever. I’m concerned about humans doing the same thing—bots just lower the costs and thus increase the viability.

I think we have this problem on massive scale, in movie reviews as well as political compaigns. When nothing is actually real anymore, the trust will disappear. It already has happened for many people.

We have an active user population, MAU, of something like fifty thousand; it’s not even a rounding error compared to far larger forms of social media.

True but that is probably an advantage. Being small means there is not much interest in adding ads or other forms of monetization, and thats saving us from a lot of enshittification. Once money enters the picture, the product becomes worse, every time. Open AI recently added ads in Chat GPT by the way...

I don’t have any fundamental problem with bots that repost content from other sources, like RSS feeds or whatever (and in some cases, I think that they could be very useful). I do think that those should be expected to self-identify as bots, and it’d be up to a community moderator to make a call on one.

In this case, we are kind of in-between since reposting software is not like a bot and more like a convenience that saves time. As long as its high quality, I dont think its a problem. Actually I wonder how many of the memes on the popular All page today are generated by bots...