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.
I’d just suggest that this is a defacto ban based on the current requirements.
If bots are going to be command triggered and require pre-approval by individual community moderators, I think it would be prudent to include an index of registered bots + commands in the community info pages.
Currently I can’t think of any reasonable way for a Beehaw user to know which bots are operational and what their commands are. If bots need to be command triggered but there’s no way to find out which ones are functional, why approve them to begin with?
I’d just suggest that this is a defacto ban.
To be honest, I’m OK with that. If I want a bot to summarise an article, I’ll go to ChatGPT or use Bing Chat. I don’t come to BeeHaw to interact with a bot. I’m here to interact with humans and in my opinion it should be a human that decides to post a link to an article and that human should also summarise it. They will do a better job than even the best bot.
While I’m not outright opposed to bots, I have yet to see a bot on Lemmy or Reddit that actually added value to the community. Usually every bot I encounter gets blocked the first time I see it.
Unfortunately a lot of bots on Lemmy that’s not really an option, for example a bot that finds interesting articles and posts them on Lemmy… I don’t want to see those posts, but at the same time I might want to see the discussion around the article. So I can’t block it.
