I am not a fan. I don’t like link dumps. It doesn’t create a discussion and the article or whatever is being relayed might be total shit and there could be better or more direct sources.

If I saw a Hackaday article about a neat project on GitHub I wouldn’t just post the article with the original title. I would probably link the GitHub page and in the body of the post link the article with a quote and maybe post similar projects in case people are interested.

I specifically dislike the bots that repost content from Reddit. The communities they post to feel fake and end up receiving so many posts actual Lemmy users posting to them get washed away in the flood.

It’s not a big deal for some communities (ex. Nature photos) but doesn’t make sense for discussion focused ones.

I block those bots

I think this sufficiently sums up my take:

The fact that that’s an option at all makes Lemmy considerably better than Reddit.

I turned on the option to hide bots so I don’t see them.

I always enjoyed browsing ‘new’. Both here and on that other site you might know of. Personally i dont like the bots here. They just clutter the timeline IMHO. I visit ‘social media’ for a feed which is pre-curated by humans. I’d rather use RSS if i wanted a constant stream of news articles without curation by others. The problem i see on lemmy is that in rare cases the bot posts still get user engagement which i miss out on if i just outright filter the bots out.

Its nothing i lose sleep over and the situation as is… is alright i guess. But if i had anything to say and had a choice i would outright ban them. But tbh i didnt think through the consquences.

I like the news bots as I’m thinking a lot of content wouldn’t be posted without them. That being said, would prefer more human engagement, but we’ll get there!

Good now, bad later.

Lemmy is small enough to only have useful bots now. Naively, I think policing bot content across instances will grow into a nightmare the day that policing is needed.

Bots are fine on any platform as long as they are clearly labeled and easy to filter out if you prefer.

Doesn’t bother me. You can always block them individually like users if they are cluttering up your feed.

I have bot accounts blocked in the user settings. Bots can’t laugh at my jokes.

I blocked one of them. I want humans.

When I used imgur, it had 2 bots, this time last year and a repost detecting bot. I thought that was useful, and the userbase over time got sick of the repost one.

When I used reddit, with all of the different subreddits, every dork on there felt like they needed to create a bot for any niche or joke but they made it opt out, instead of in. That was excessive and i found it annoying.

I hope Lemmy stays closer to the first example, or no bots at all.

Annoying as shit

I just block them on sigth, especially the one made by people that think we want RSS feeds.

As soon as I see a few posts from a bot in a row, I block it

All instance banned with prejudice.