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we banned and purged that acct from our servers earlier today
Is there an option to report accounts / comments? Are bots even forbidden? I'm with you, Reddit was a bot shit show and I'd love to see a space with zero bots. I think even the utility bots like unit conversion added very little value.
There definitely were good bots on Reddit - they were just drowned out by a million shitty ones.
Agreed. I was a long time lurker but I'm trying to contribute to conversations to help grow the space: bots don't help grow the space; they only clog it up. If someone didn't care enough to find a conversion formula or whatever, they probably don't care that much about the result either. All of that right there would add up to a 3-4 comment string that added nothing.
Unfortunately, it looks like the wave of bots is inevitable. I think I'll just end up sticking to the niche communities and yelling get off my lawn.
The SCP sub had a bot that would tag any relevant SCP articles that you mention in your title or in the comments. It was extremely useful for getting into the community.
I always found it funny when Marvin would go rogue and appear outside the SCP sub (which wasn't supposed to happen). Perhaps he was an SCP himself 🤷🏻♂️
For certain tcg/ccgs, some roleplay games with talent trees, even for Lego sets mentioned the bots on reddit subs were great ways to provide relevant context. There is most definitely a place for utility bots in modern social media, the difficult part is figuring out how to define a reasonable limit on that and how to enforce it effectively.
The difficult part about that is, the way Lemmy is designed to easily integrate any custom client also allows bots to be made even easier. Only way to really do it would be by restricting the API, and with it, a lot of the freedoms of Lemmy.
Bots are not inherently evil. If they do something valuable for the community, and work as intended, they can be very helpful. While I'm not familiar with the details, that looks to be a product release post - which (depending on the community) can be very useful to automate.
The problem is that we have all been flooded with useless, low-quality shitpost bots. Reddit was full of them - like the one that would reply if your post was in alphabetical order. Naturally, we want to avoid/limit that as much as possible around here. But I'm also not as concerned - Lemmy doesn't have the incentives that Reddit did, specifically there's no karma.
On Lemmy, we just have to treat them the same as any other bad actor. We can block them individually, mods can ban them from that community, their instance can ban them, and our instance(s) can defederate with theirs. Due to the high demand for this feature, I expect we'll be able to individually block instances in the near future.
Most of the really useful bots don't actually make posts. They work in the background and, if they are like notification things like the reminder bot, they PM whoever called them. I don't think I have ever seen a useful bot that comments or posts publicly.
I already don't like the cross post bots spamming reddit posts here. Half of them are questions (such as AITA or ELI5 posts). Why would I answer a question made by someone on Reddit when they won't actually see the reply? 🤦♂️
Yeah... it really seems like a paywall is the only thing that stops this. 🤷♂️
Oww well, it was fun while it lasted!
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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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