As the service grows, I have noticed more and more people and bots popping up, only posting links to a news article and that’s that. Usually there is no post, no summary and nothing from the OP but the link.
What do you all think about this?
Do you think it’s a good thing, because it is providing content? Do you maybe find it annyoing and if so, why?
I myself am happy when people take the time out of their say to try to provide content, but for me it’s a bit low effort a lot of the times. Bots I tend to block immediately and people it they make it hard for me to reader other posts between all their link-posting.
But I am more curious how you all think about this and whether you consider it good or bad.
I absolutely dislike “repost bots”. I prefer communication with real people.
I guess we all do, but as of now, we have to choose between lack of content or some bot content
I suppose it depends on how you define content. Usually when people post it includes some discussion. Those types of posts get drowned in the bot posts however.
Usually when people post it includes some discussion.
Indeed, but as of now, I feel we are lacking a bit of a userbase to have enough content at all times. I know the part about everyone posting as much as they can, but I guess we still need bots for a bit
Lemmy, like Reddit, operates like a link aggregator, so news article spam sorted by type into sublemmy’s is sort of its “natural state”. IMO there’s not really anything wrong with it, because it’s a good way to get conversations started.
I don’t really like the lemmit.online bot that just reposts “archive” posts from Reddit.
As long as they mark the accounts as a bot account it doesn’t bother me, if it gets too much I can just turn on the don’t show bot accounts check.
I used to run a news bot on my profile for my community, but some people PM’d me to mark my profile as bot. I also personally use my account so I don’t want my other post/comments to be seen as bot activity; and my instance did not permit creation of a second account for the bot only, what should I do to keep the bot running without having my profile marked as bot?
As long as it’s not “spammy” and there’s actual engagement or discussion on the posts I don’t see an issue. But if the community being posted to isn’t engaging with the posts, or it’s crowding out the more interesting posts, yeah that’s not great and shouldn’t be allowed.
I am a human who posts a lot of news. It’s not mainstream news though and it’s all been read and selected by me.
Most of it is to a small niche news sub and gets little engagement yet - the 90-9-1 rule applies and we don’t have the numbers yet.
If anyone discusses it with me I’m over the moon!
I feel like it will be increasingly used for propaganda, not discussion. By cherry picking articles, these news accounts will try to shape public opinion.
