What are your thoughts on bots and people posting only news articles on lemmy?

I absolutely dislike “repost bots”. I prefer communication with real people.

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 feel like it will be increasingly used for propaganda, not discussion. By cherry picking articles, these news accounts will try to shape public opinion.

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.

Hate it. If it's a person fine, I guess, but I wish bots weren't allowed to create posts at all. I would rather see Lemmy grow very slowly than see Lemmy become a mirror of Reddit, with shit tons of scraped posts that have little to no engagement on them. That's not a community, it's a newspaper. I don't understand the "massive growth at any cost" mindset.

I don't mind the news, I absolutely hate the bots.

I said in another comment before, there's an "AITA" bot reposting everything from Reddit, but, who are we supposed to answer if it's a bot that's asking? It doesn't make any sense...

If there is no engagement (or at least something that's educational or informational), then what's the point?

If it was a "TIL" bot I'd probably have a harder time hating on it, but still.

Hopefully a lot of the bots are a stop-gap measure while the user base develops.

There's a voting system. That should give you an idea of whether they're considered good or bad and of their visibility in general.

I hate it. Some communities just fill up my feed with links to news articles with zero (or zero quality) comments. I either unsubscribe from these communities, or block the poster. In some cases they are so frequent, and with images that are effectively advertising. That and the zero comments, they just remind me of Reddit ads. I don't think you can hope to build a community by drowning out any discussion with a flood of posts from news sites. If you're the mod of a community with so little interaction, then you should be curating content and adding comments yourself.

My problem with it's poor quality sources and/or content. For example: yellow journalism. I want to be informed and have good discussions, not being outraged or click baited.

News articles are fine, but I'm not as thrilled with the Reddit reposting bots.

I used to get most of my news from Reddit, now that I don’t use Reddit I get them from here. I post pretty frequently news articles on my country’s community and think that they are a good source for a discussion.

I get news from the fediverse so I'm very happy with others posting news.

I don't like repost bots though because they tend to be programmed to let non-fedizens control the agenda. Eg scraping what the people of Reddit upvoted.

It really annoys me, especially as there seems to be at least two lemmy instances that are 99% just a bot reposting everything from reddit.. Really wish I could block whole instances

I'm generally opposed to spambots and unnecessary bots.

If these bots are just, like, CNN wrote a bot to post every CNN article to a news community, that's annoying.

But as long as the bots aren't spammers / advertisers / just annoying as shit, it seems like they're doing something pretty useful without causing any harm. Not opposed to it.

Oh, and the other problem on reddit ends up being that these bots farm karma to make themselves look more legitimate, as though they're people. That's probably something we should keep an eye on long-term.

is more than fine, is content, what we need, and Manny communities work like that, forbidding to add blablablaba in the text of a post.

Bots that repost suck and the trend needs to stop

At the end of the day I'd argue that the majority of people want a "Reddit like" experience, with dozens or posts with heaps of engagement. I'm happy to have news / repost bots if the end result is a more engaging comment thread / discussion.

When looking at older Reddit posts, I never enjoyed the comments where the discussion was OP focused. I'm keen to have them phrase the original question / link and then step back and let the discussion naturally form

Not only do I think bots should be banned from making posts, I also think that people that display bot-like behavior should be warned and then banned if they don't stop.

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.

I am 100% fine with this.

Not crazy about bots reposting shit from Reddit though.

I don't mind it, as long as they're keeping it relevant to the communities they're posting in. There's a couple I've noticed that don't seem to respect the intent of the communities too much, but most of the bots I've seen seem to be pretty well-curated so far.

I am a mod of !t_mobile@lemmy.ml and do a decent amount of article posting. Once the community has some organic traffic i will slow down or totally stop doing it. The community has 109 subs but only once in a while is there ever a comment and there may be one post that i didnt make.

Its mostly useless spam, I have already blocked a few.

Besides porn and sports bots i don't see them as problem, but you can disable being shown marked bots.

Depends on the community and the articles I guess. Not a fan of bots making posts unless it's in comments for something useful like auto TLDR or something.

I find most of the "news" and "technology" communities useless and boring for this reason and usually end up unsubscribing when a slew of blaaahhhhh fills up my feed. Lots of articles, stories etc just copied and pasted (or scraped) with no context, explanation, insight, commentary. Why does this matter? Why did you posts it? Why should I care?

If you texted a link to this article to a family member or friend...what would you say to explain WHY you're sending it? Would you just send the link and the title with no other details? They would find it weird. Share it with me like we're friends.

Sorting by new is swarmed with bot posts. Switched to top - 6H on Sync and the difference is huge. But, any activity on lemmy is good in my books. If a space is to be a pinnacle of perfection, it would be too off putting, like tildes. I rarely visit that site anymore.

Sounds good to me but also i can get my news from google news so I hope the bot is posting non-mainstream stuff. reddit felt like democrat astroturfing. like too much majory taylor greene. I like to laugh at em too but it just felt.... bought out. HA. bot out. bought out.

I'd rather it be people than bots. If it's someone posting an article of something they're interested in, I don't necessarily need an initial comment from them, but if I post one, it's be nice to get a response back from OP.

Especially if it's something non-US I like learning how things work on other parts if the world. I didn't really want a US take on world events when I could get it from someone there.

so far I've seen some bots post articles that setup some pretty decent conversation. I am slightly annoyed that it floods but, I just keep my sorting by stuff that's hot and it's usually good.

I get why they exist but my new feed gets spammed with the same bot, same article posted to three communities. excessive

I don't mind about people only posting news articles, so long as they actively participate to the discussion in the comments.

For bots as long as they identify themselves as bots then at least I can block them if they feel too spammy for me.