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.

IMO the post bots and bot-only communities should be on their own dedicated instances, and the communities should be labeled that they are bot communities - right in the name.

Then people shouldn’t think twice if they want to copy content from a bot and post it in a “real” community for discussion - especially content that is just a link to a video or an article. It would be weird to do that with story content copied from Reddit (like AITA.) But for links and even some questions and discussion posts, they deserve views and replies.

That way the repost bots would actually serve a purpose and generate “real” content without using resources from “real” instances.

But I feel the bots as they currently operate are actually stifling content that should be posted be real people. e.g. someone finds an article, but sees it was already posted by a bot, so they don’t post it while the bot’s article falls off the page because no one replies or half of users have them blocked.

yeah these repost bots are super annoying and not something I was really running into when I was on kbin - I made a lemm.ee account finally yesterday and was so confused on the amount of bot content in my feed 😖

i blocked and reported the bot. its the definition of digital garbage

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]

I think they’re working on the algorithm to combat these things, but I agree with you. Reposting for content like actual people are doing with the memes is great imo, but what you’re talking about needs to go. AITA on lemmy.world had a go at it and they stopped the bot for that very reason. I think their intentions were good but it just didn’t work out, probably the same with the yoututube place.

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Too much content on lemmy is created by bots. It is unclear how they select such content.

Particularly on the news. Too many bots kills diversity…

It might be useful some rule on allowing posts in the news communities only if the user has made a certain amount of comments recently in the same community

At some point Lemmy will be big enough that these no-comment posts will just drop off the frontpages, right?

If you open reddit and choose All and new you also get a lot of junk.

When I see a community that only has bot submissions at first glance i immediately leave. It doesn’t matter if the bot just started posting ten minutes ago and the rest of the posts are from people, if the first page is all bot spam I scram.

I’ve noticed a lot of bot authors get extremely defensive and rude when anyone comments on their bot, too. Obviously not every author, but most have that I’ve seen. How are bots a good thing if the people behind them act like that?

Basically I feel like there’s no reason to comment in a bot post. OP isn’t going to respond, it’s a bot it doesn’t even know what it’s posting. People will comment though not realizing it’s bot and they’ll ask questions expecting it to be a person and reply back. That’s not a good way to build social groups in my opinion.

How many people enjoyed gallowbob post spam on Reddit? That’s all these bots are. Gallowbots.

I do like the idea of bot communities though. Plainly labeled of course. I could see how that could be worth browsing through sometimes.

I feel like this discussion is a very chicken and the egg type. A dead instance with no posts won’t attract new people, so you have bots start the discussion with new posts. If the instance is too flooded with new topics you never get users engaged and the instance looks just as dead. The NBA instances have been talking about this. Right now bots do a new post for every game thread, but there are not enough active users to have discussion on all of them. So really it’s a pick your poison.

Personally I think the fediverse needs some other kind of unique “gimmick” to draw your more average user in/away from reddit other than “we are the decentralized reddit alternative.” I couldn’t tell you what that is, but the average person probably doesn’t care about the reasons that brought us here, so there needs to be something else to draw them in until instances become more full and engaged.