There has been some discussion lately regarding bot accounts on lemm.ee. Many users have noticed that some of our feeds are dominated by bot posts. These bot posts are not super engaging - they generally don't generate any discussions. The most problematic bots are the ones which just repost large amounts of content from elsewhere.
I have looked over a lot of user feedback on this issue, and also discussed the matter with other lemm.ee admins. We feel that at this time, repost bots are not healthy for lemm.ee, so we are introducing some new rules to limit such bots.
To be clear, I have nothing against users who want to use bots to just help organize and run their communities. The problem is specifically with communities which are not just supported by bots, but actually overwhelmingly run by bots.
Proposed new rules for bots
The rules we are considering are as follows:
All bot accounts must be explicitly marked as bots (can be done through the API or on the user settings page)
Bots are not allowed to vote on any posts or comments
Bots should disclose their specified purpose in their profile description
Bots should not have a disruptive influence on a community
Bots should not be responsible for the majority of content in any community
If you are a bot developer and you can already tell that your bot would be in violation of some of these rules, then I am very sorry to inconvenience you, but I would ask to please choose (or consider hosting!) another Lemmy instance for your bot.
These rules are not in effect yet, but if reception is positive, then we will start enforcing these rules from the 1st of August!
Please share your feedback, both negative and positive, in the comments below!
Lemmy programming stream
For some unfortunate personal reasons, I will be having some extra free time in August. A silver lining to this is that I will most likely be able to use some of this free time to increase my contributions to Lemmy!
I've had an idea for a while that a programming stream focused on Lemmy might help to bring in additional new contributors and generate additional interest in Lemmy, so today, I am planning to do an experimental programming stream, where I will first try to learn about, and then improve, the 2fa logic which is currently implemented in Lemmy.
Some caveats:
I am not a streamer or an entertainer, so this might be an extremely boring stream
I am not some amazing superstar programmer, so I might make dumb mistakes or miss obvious things, please don't hold that against me 😅
If this sounds interesting to you, I am planning to do a 1 hour stream starting right now at https://twitch.tv/sunaurus. Feel free to jump in! If it's not a massive failure, then I will also upload a recording later on. Edit: Stream is over, thanks to all who tuned in!
I think this is great, thank you for doing this. The bots that just repost content from Reddit are useless. Generates zero discussion. Especially the ones that copy content from AITA or other similar communities. If the OP is not there to answer questions or respond, what’s the point?
The bots that duplicate over every single comment also aren't useful, IMO. The comment sections for those posts are so full of bot comments that a human user won't see any opportunity to create an engagement hook. And if another human DID comment, its so lost in the noise that no one will probably see it or respond. Further, since votes aren't replicated over, horrible odious comments that got voted into oblivion get copied over with equal weight as good comments
Exactly. If there is no chance of some interesting engagement from OP or others then it is just noise. I have been trying to engage more in Lemmy than I used to in Reddit and I was wondering how to block these type of posts, especially from Reddit, in a more manageable way.
Yeah, the repost bots just don't work. Reading the comments is half the fun of using reddit/lemmy, but lemmy has a very small userbase still, so the comments are a little bit slow moving. Having a ton of reposts suddenly spammed in splits that small comment activity up to the point where comments basically don't exist and you're viewing a slideshow of empty threads.
Sorry to hear about your personal situation, but that is quite the silver lining and I am sure Lemmy as a whole will benefit greatly from it. Solid ruleset on bots as well. We are currently rolling out rules about bots on Lemmy World, reading this we might have to go over some of them again. We don't want to stomp out all bots because some are problematic.
Thank you thank you thank you! I was just feeling extremely annoyed last night when my entire feed was nothing but YouTube reposts from a bot. If that's what I wanted to look at, I would just go to YouTube. I think this will be an overall very positive change.
They definitely have certain times that they post, I've noticed. I've been on overnight a couple times (EST) and New gets flooded with bot posts.
That may be because there's less people posting so they show up more, but I don't think so. I've seen nothing but pages of bot posts all in a row. I never see that during the day.
Absolutely, I'm all about the human interaction here. The bots on that other site made some posts or communities feel like ghost towns. I don't want any bot posts.
I for one fully support this course of action. I’ve been blocking these bots left and right to keep my Local feed from being completely cluttered with posts that aren’t generating engagement, but I’d be more than happy to not need to.
Thank you again. I've had some issues with bots taking over my feeds. Zero engagement bots dont seem to have a place though I can understand the appeal of them for archiving.
Bots should not be responsible for the majority of content in any community
I think this could maybe be qualified a little bit. I think of communities like /r/news or /r/worldnews, and they are quite largely just links from other news sources, that are then discussed, and they're a type of community I myself really valued from reddit, before moving here.
I don't think the argument is fair that you should just use RSS if you want aggregation, communities focused on "link aggregation" (which is what Lemmy is on paper, is it not? a "link aggregator"?) provide SO much more. Off the top of my head, communities and community discussion can bypass paywalls, identify misleading headlines, point out related stories or context... I don't see the problem with communities like this having links seeded by bots. One could argue it actually helps fight bias.
I am 100% on board with ditching all the reddit-scraping bots. Reddit posts are not primary sources of anything.
It seems lemm.ee is not at a scale yet where we can allow even such useful bots without overloading our local feeds with bot posts. I am sure we can re-evaluate this if activity continues to grow, though.
I really think the "simple" approach of categorizing bot VS non-bot and federate vs defederate are only masking the underlying problem : all posts do not have the same amount of "value".
However, with Lemmy they do. And I think this is what's broken. If you or anyone in the community has time or interest, I think focusing on rewriting the "what's hot" algorithm would reduce/remove many of these "workarounds" (like the one you're suggesting).
(I'm just thinking out loud) but a better "what's hot" would have each post weighted:
Against the number of people subscribed to a channel (more subscribers == more relevance)
Against the average number of comments by different users/ post / community. (many comments from different users == more relevant) This would implicitly address the issue of bot spam, that you mentioned.
An upper limit on new topics / community. This would avoid the meme community from hijacking all of "what's hot".
Of course this cannot all be done in real time. Things like "average number of comments per post" could be precalculated daily, but I think it'll be "good enough" and a radical improvement to what Lemmy currently offers.
Ahh I'm not going to catch this live but would love to see this. You've done so much to help out with Lemmy (and helped me personally with my instance!) So super interested to see this.
Big difference with aggregators is that it allows voting on RSS feeds. Also you can discuss articles in Lemmy instead of having to create accounts on each individual site (when it is even possible).
EDIT: I guess I hadn't looked for more webcomic communities in a while and there are more available now which have people actually posting OC to instead of just reposting from elsewhere with no discussion. I'll leave my original comment below regardless.
I'm of mixed opinion about this. I only subscribe to one bot-led community (!comics@lemmit.online) and whilst I hate that every comic is just reposted from Reddit by the bot and so has no comments or discussion, it seems that no comic creators are posting to Lemmy yet and so I would rather still be able to see the content they are creating than miss it entirely. I understand that both the community and the bot are hosted on lemmit.online so they won't be affected by the bot policy of lemm.ee but it still speaks to the problem of lack of content posted to Lemmy in general (at least in certain communities).
Will it still be possible to view posts by bots on different instances? Kbin.social blocks these from being visible as far as I recall
One of the anime communities utilises a bot to generate discussion posts with links to relevant information as episodes come out for convenience, given the purpose of the community being for discussions, would this be another legitimate use that the rules could account for?
If you browse lemm.ee not logged in at the time of this comment all you see are pages of bots reposting reddit threads. There's no way anyone that sees that decides "oh this place is cool, I'm going to sign up".
I think this might be useful for some kind of automatic aggregation of content from other communities or some specific cases. For example, I liked, when I was on reddit, the subreddit RedditRead on which each post was generated from other subreddit comments, one post by book found in the comment on a specific post in another subreddit. I thought about setting up the same here when I have a bit more time... Now, the posts would be all generated but users could still comments, so it's not purely artificial stuff...
Maybe one alternative would be to authorize such bot content generated communities but clearly flags them as such in the community sidebar or so. So people who are ok with generated content can subscribe and those who don't like can block.
In a general way, I have bad feeling about strong rules (except for stuff obviously wrong or destructive but here I don't think it's the case), and prefer case by case monitoring. In some cases it can be good for the community and in other very bad, and I find that saying just "it's forbidden" is too easy and frustrating decision.
I have found the reddit bots a bit annoying. Not to say I don't want to ever see a reddit link on lemmy, but the communities that are essentially a clone of a subreddit seems kind of pointless. I might as well have stayed on reddit then. So I would love to see those bots go away, or get moved into their own community.
But overall, I agree that we should cut down on bit posts. I'd rather see discussion rather than dumps of links.
As almost everybody seems to agree (with regards to the comments on this post), why don't you simply state that reddit repost bots are forbidden on this instance and not generalize to each and every bot while there can be some useful use-case for news, aggregation from other Lemmy communities or so...
I have the feeling that talking about reddit related stuff become a bit the elephant in the room...
Well, the most reported bot at the moment is not a Reddit repost bot at all. We would like to solve the issue on a more general level at the moment - by limiting volume of bot content in relation to organic user-created content.
Seems fair, understood the objective and the fact you're not closed to change your mind later. If you have no plans to defederate with instance hosting boys I think it's not a bad thing to have instances for bots and other for human users only...
Honestly, i love and hate the alternate youtube frontend bot, i love that it links to a better client bit it does clutter things up. I would love if it was brief and stuck its explanation on its website or a spoiler, the bot takes up as mutch text is this paragraph just to give you the link,
mockup of a better post style
Here are privicy respecting ways of viewing this media
Where it puts the relivant sentences into quotes and replaces the links with privicy respecting ones, also should not notify users of a new message, that requires a change to lemmy api
I agree. I noticed a community mentioned above that was nothing but bot posts from YouTube. The community name did have YouTube in the name, but there were no comments on any post that I saw. A community that is just bots reposting information, possibly in random fashion, is not really a community, because no one is communing with another human or with a bot.
You would have amore meaningful time facing two TVs together and leaving the building, then a community full of nothing but bots. It's a waste of a community, data, and servers.
I think this might be useful for some kind of automatic aggregation of content from other communities or some specific cases. For example, I liked, when I was on reddit, the subreddit RedditRead on which each post was generated from other subreddit comments, one post by book found in the comment on a specific post in another subreddit. I thought about setting up the same here when I have a bit more time... Now, the posts would be all generated but users could still comments, so it's not purely artificial stuff...
Maybe one alternative would be to authorize such bot content generated communities but clearly flags them as such in the community sidebar or so. So people who are ok with generated content can subscribe and those who don't like can block.
In a general way, I have bad feeling about strong rules (except for stuff obviously wrong or destructive but here I don't think it's the case), and prefer case by case monitoring. In some cases it can be good for the community and in other very bad, and I find that saying just "it's forbidden" is too easy and frustrating decision.
Personally I don't like replying to bots. It feels like talking to a wall.
There is no real person behind the bot account I'm replying to and I will never have a discussion with this account. Isn't having discussions the point of social media though? Otherwise I could just read my RSS feeds ...
I've therefore selected to not show me bot posts on Lemmy and try to hide bots from Mastodon by filtering for keywords, such as "bot" or "twitter feed", in profiles.