As some may have noticed, a fairly large portion of the post on this community are article links posted by bots. I am no moderator and am just a regular user like the rest of you, but I want to know what the community thinks of the posting bots. here is a sample of my opinion to get conversation started:
Pros:
- lots of content to engage with
- people can focus on discussing things not finding thing
Cons:
- lack of reliable quality of article
- lack of diversity of content
As a (hopefully good citizen) bot maintainer, the best advice I can give is to not follow active or new. Hot and top should not show bot posts unless they are being upvoted.
but I want to follow new. It’s how I find niche communities here, and because there was a lot of botting on a community, I had to block the entire community.
I come to lemmy because I want to interact with humans. If I wanted to read random articles, I’ll go to my bookmarked blogs.
I can’t speak for the posting bots, but game day bots are pretty fundamental to sports communities - like, we have no shot at attracting any interest to our community if there aren’t game day bots. We’re literally running the same code as the reddit bots, just using the lemmy API. So that same traffic exists on Reddit, it is just that there is so much other traffic that they aren’t as prominent.