For example: Funzobot, News bot, and Finance bot.
I think this sufficiently sums up my take:
The fact that that’s an option at all makes Lemmy considerably better than Reddit.
Problem is it requires bot runners to be honest.
You can probably get your instance admin to ban any bot accounts that aren’t being honest, which is also a step up for Reddit.
how do we distinguish bots from real accounts?
Can bots respond to direct messages or replies?
In theory you can write scripts with Selenium to do anything a regular user would do. Most bots have limits but it’s always possible to basically write scripts that virtually click buttons, write content, post content, etc.
yes
If we want to, how do we disincentive them?
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 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!
I just block them on sigth, especially the one made by people that think we want RSS feeds.
Annoying as shit
As soon as I see a few posts from a bot in a row, I block it
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.
I turned on the option to hide bots so I don’t see them.
I wish there was an option to turn off link-only posts. At least have something in the body of the post. Maybe a quote or a TLDR. Otherwise it just feels like a bot posting.
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.
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We’re so close to LARPing Bladrunner.
I haven’t seen a bot in a long long time here.
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.
I have bot accounts blocked in the user settings. Bots can’t laugh at my jokes.
I blocked one of them. I want humans.
