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!
This is the numbers I want you guys to understand 90–9–1 rule:
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.
That's why I wanted to post so much. If I don't post, most of these communities simply don't have enough people creating content to replace it. You need content before you can get lurkers to engage, commenters to participate, and eventually more people to start posting themselves.
I'm not posting for the sake of flooding Lemmy. I'm trying to help solve the exact problem Lemmy has: not enough content creators.
If you're counting the public moderation history as the fourth mechanism, call it quadruple moderation / quadruple jeopardy:
Quadruple moderation really doesn't help. Every active content creator on Lemmy has to deal with four layers:
For prolific content creators, that's brutal. The more you post, the more chances you have for one of these independent moderators/admins to object to something. You effectively need all of them to remain aligned indefinitely.
It also creates an obvious attack surface: anyone who wants to disrupt Lemmy - trolls, bad actors, or even people deliberately trying to drive creators away - can exploit reports and visible moderation history to amplify a single moderation decision into others.
Reddit doesn't have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You're primarily dealing with the subreddit you're contributing to. Lemmy desperately needs content creators while simultaneously giving them more independent ways to get shut out the more they contribute.
I genuinely don't believe everyone complaining about prolific posters simply fails to understand this. At some point, I have to question whether some of this is deliberate.
If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a growing federated competitor, this is exactly where I'd attack it: its content creators. Lemmy already has a tiny creator base, and its quadruple-moderation system makes those creators incredibly easy to target through reports, bans, and public moderation histories.
I suspect Reddit or people acting in Reddit's interests are exploiting this. You don't need to hack Lemmy or take servers offline. Just convince Lemmy moderators that its most prolific contributors are "spam," get them banned, and let the network starve itself of content.
Whether Reddit is actually doing that is something we'd need evidence to prove - but Lemmy's structure makes that kind of subversion remarkably easy.
I knew about those stats already, and I don't think the volume of your posts is a problem, at least not on this instance. But yes, moderators on other instances may act the way you describe if they feel you are a bot spammer.
But do you think it's the volume of your posts that are the problem or that some of them are low quality? I keep coming back to this in my mind. Let's say if you posted 30 posts per day and they all ended up on the frontpage. Would anyone be annoyed by that?
About the federated moderation, it's kind of necessary. I had someone from another instance start posting illegal content here and of course I needed to be able to block that user. But yes, there are some moderators on other instances that are too heavy handed in my opinion. I believe we should stay in the background until it's really needed.
I think you should continue posting like you did before. Many of your posts were liked and ended up on the frontpage. But yes, I know you want to post even more than you do. And I agree, Lemmy could use a lot more content! But it needs to be good content. It all boils down to that in the end. As long as it's actually good, it's great for everyone.