Ok, so I get that there are two views on the success of Lemmy. 1, more content = more views = more users signing up. 2, Quality content = more views = more users signing up.
I'm firmly in the #2 category myself but I understand the viewpoint of #1 even if I dont agree with it. For some people #1 might cause them to sign up...
But I dont see how low effort bots creating useless content for content sake is beneficial to this community at all.
Take this link for example... https://lemm.ee/c/youtube_feed
There are hundreds of posts by a youtube crawling bot that just seems to be posting random youtube video links and adding the video title as the post description. Only a handful of the two hundred videos posted have any comments and those are just 1-2 people saying this is useless content.
Now before anyone jumps in and says, you can just block the bot, or block the community or...
Yes I could and I will be. But the problem is when someone new comes to lemmy and randomly selects lemm.ee they are going to be inundated with with these low effort no replay video posts and walk away back to reddit.
I dont know the solution to this either. Obviously someone wants this content since they spent the time to set up a bot and a community and etc. But for the life of me I cant understand why that person wants it.
The stats for the community are interesting too.
185 posts, 28 subscribers (probably 28 repost bots) and 4 comments. **4 ** COMMENTS!
Obviously I'm going to block the community from my feed but It makes for a really bad first time user experience when these bot communities with no interactions are populating the default feed for all new users and guests... Again, I dont know the solution to this either... but it's definitely a problem.
First of all, I have made a small change to Lemmy to allow instance admins to set the default feed for new users. The default feed for all new lemm.ee users is actually "All" now!
I think over time, the local feed will probably improve as well for those who are interested in it, but for now "All" seems to be a much safer choice.
As for bots that just mass-post content - I am personally not a fan of them. Maybe it indeed makes sense to tune the algorithm to value bot content less that real human content (at least by a little). I will monitor the situation for a while and try to come up with some ideas.
Kind of a feature request, but I wish "Ignore Community" and "Block Community" were different. Most of the ones I block seem decent, but something like youtube_feed I'd want to "Block" in a way that records my disappointment.
a blocked number on their community stats to show everyone's approval or disapproval. We already list subscribed numbers. List unsubscribed numbers!
That's exactly why I want separate Ignore and Block options; there's lots of nice communities that I'm not interested in updates but wish them well.
And I want to see what new communities pop up, and later Block or Ignore or Subscribe
Thank you for your work!