After some discussions in !chat, we came up with the conclusion we should adopt rules surrounding bots.
We’ll ban bots which we are aware of that currently don’t follow these rules and contact their creators. Please report bots that don’t follow these.
Hi there!
I’ve been contacted regarding my @autotldr@lemmings.world bot. Currently it’s disabled for beehaw.org as can be seen here.
I’d like to raise a discussion though as I think the bot is really useful.
Here are some global all-time stats:
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Comments Upvotes Downvotes Negative comments count Positive comments count Neutral comments count
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430 3096 82 0 429 1
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These are per-instance stats (I stripped other instances than yours). If I’m not mistaken, downvotes are disabled on Beehaw, so the like ratio doesn’t say much, but other numbers still could:
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Instance Comments Upvotes Downvotes Like ratio Upvotes per comment
-------------------- ---------- --------- ----------- ------------ ---------------------
beehaw.org 28 236 0 100.00% 8.43
Edit: The stats are generated by this - while it’s not the cleanest code I’ve ever written, I think it’s pretty readable and everyone can see that the stats are not some weird numbers to make it look better than it is.
My thoughts are mostly that I wish this were integrated in Lemmy because of a couple reasons:
- People might be interested to see comments, see that there’s one in a thread only to realize it’s a bot
- The sorting algorithm of lemmy makes no difference between bots and users so it can give a much higher importance to posts which attract bots (namely news)
- The algorithm really should so I made an issue about it (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3806)
- Posting it as a comment just feels a bit noisy? It takes a lot of space in a thread.
- On the other hand, maybe it could be hidden by a spoiler tag? I think @nfld0001@beehaw.org mentioned this being a possibility
…maybe it could be hidden by a spoiler tag…
I like that idea a lot…solves some problems while still allowing the bot.
I’m just trying to understand, generally speaking, how the bot works. It appears to me that the bot is looking for posted articles that exceed a certain word count threshold. If it finds these, then it creates a summary and posts this as a comment. Am I understanding this correctly?
It has support for specific news sites, I don’t want to rely on some automatic text extraction because those are prone to breaking. Here are the content extractors themselves, each for one site. If a post that contains a link to any of the supported sites is found across all of Lemmy (that the bot can see), it extracts the text and then summarizes it using this. It takes 6 sentences directly from the article that look most important to the machine learning model it uses. Then it posts it as a comment.
I liked the original autotldr bot on Reddit. The one here though seems to be producing a large summary instead of just TL;DR.
Here’s an example: https://lemmings.world/comment/920986
This comment takes up most of the screen space on my mobile device. I don’t consider this to be a TL;DR. At this rate, I’d opt to just read the article in question instead.
The other problem is that lengthy TL;DRs like this obstruct comments, making it annoying to scroll past for those of who are on mobile devices. I could block the bot of course, but I don’t want to - I do want a legit TL;DR, not a reworded article.
Here’s my attempt at generating a TL;DR of the mentioned article, using ChatGPT:
Two manuscripts published on the arXiv pre-peer-review repository claim to have synthesized a room-temperature superconductor, LK-99. This superconductor is a variation of lead apatite, and allegedly operates not only at room temperature but also above water’s boiling point, at regular pressures. The synthesis process is complex, yielding potential variations in the final product. Early attempts to reproduce these findings have shown mixed results, adding to the intrigue and uncertainty surrounding the material’s properties. While these claims could potentially revolutionize the field, their validation would give rise to further challenges about how to transform this material into a practical, high-current-carrying form. The upcoming period is likely to see intense activity from labs worldwide in their efforts to corroborate these results, which could significantly accelerate the emergence of a scientific consensus.
IMO, this is what a TL;DR should look like - a single paragraph and under 150 words.
To be fair, the TL;DR would be a lot shorter if the breaks between sentences were removed. I personally draw the line at around 200 words for a summary, so the 183 words in the summary is a bit long but still a reasonable TL;DR for an article.
Since Lemmy implements spoiler tags, I think wrapping the summary in a spoiler tag would be a way to solve the length problem.
Note - I’m not a beehaw user
The one here though seems to be producing a large summary instead of just TL;DR
I kinda prefer this though, IMO condensing an article down into a one or a few sentences could make it difficult to facilitate a “healthy” discussion
A really miniscule TL;DR seems more likely for a bunch of assumptions to be made based on that alone, and increase the likelihood of users calling each other out for not actually reading the article.
This comment takes up most of the screen space on my mobile device
Oh ☹️ I decreased the font size for comments on my mobile so there was a higher content density but that might not work for you
Would it be possible for the bot to DM us instead when communities decide to ban/restrict them for whatever reason?
I’ve found this bot incredibly useful personally, and I assume the community does too, looking at various Lemmy posts where the TLDR bot upvotes closely follow the OP upvotes (sometimes exceeding it)
Note - I’m not a beehaw user, for anyone reading whose apps do not show my instance.
I’m not sure how to properly tag a user to where they’ll definitely get a notification, so I wanted to reply directly to you to make sure you’ve seen the idea mentioned here in this comment about maybe wrapping the summaries in spoiler tags so that those who want to read it easily can and so that they don’t automatically take up so much space to scroll past on smaller screens and those that don’t want them maybe aren’t as bothered (for lack of being able to think of a better word to use here) by them.
I do appreciate TL:DR; bots but/and I think the spoiler tags idea is a great idea and I would love to see it implemented, if you feel that’s something you’d like to do. :)
It appears, from what I can tell, that you’ve got a green light on this referencing what @Zoop@beehaw.org has stated.
