Hey folks!
Bots on lemm.ee
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
There is this Reddit scraper bot that does it much better: https://github.com/daniel-lxs/BotIt
It can be configured to only scrape highly upvoted external links and that works quite well on one of our communities.
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.
Completely agree with you, some slight difference should be applied to this rule to state clearly what should be avoided and what is valuable.
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.
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.
Fine by me. I’ve already blocked a few bot accounts that were spam posting
Repost bots need to be regulated in volume. Otherwise this instance becomes an aggregator, and we already have RSS for that.
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).
Lemm.ee and @[email protected] have been rocking it from day 1. You take good care of your community, Ty.
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.
I’m all for pretty much all of these changes. The only thing I’d give feedback on is specifically this line.
Bots should not have a disruptive influence on a community
I think this needs a clear definition, before I can say that I agree with that.
Just my thoughts.
Some bot content is okay, but I agree it should be moderated. Thanks for your effort on this, no disagreement.
Also, thanks for your contributions to making Lemmy great!
Great news, honestly! I rather have less content, but actual interaction than all those bots reposting.
And I’ll try to check out your stream, sounds really interesting! Hopefully my internet will be also agree, haha
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.
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.
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.
I for one welcome our new human overlords.
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”.
When I see a community that is all bot generated content from Reddit, it’s an instablock for me. Thanks for cracking down.
