Ok, so I get that there are two views on the success of Lemmy. 1, more content = more views = more users signing up. 2, Quality content = more views = more users signing up.
I’m firmly in the #2 category myself but I understand the viewpoint of #1 even if I dont agree with it. For some people #1 might cause them to sign up…
But I dont see how low effort bots creating useless content for content sake is beneficial to this community at all.
Take this link for example… https://lemm.ee/c/youtube_feed
There are hundreds of posts by a youtube crawling bot that just seems to be posting random youtube video links and adding the video title as the post description. Only a handful of the two hundred videos posted have any comments and those are just 1-2 people saying this is useless content.
Now before anyone jumps in and says, you can just block the bot, or block the community or…
Yes I could and I will be. But the problem is when someone new comes to lemmy and randomly selects lemm.ee they are going to be inundated with with these low effort no replay video posts and walk away back to reddit.
I dont know the solution to this either. Obviously someone wants this content since they spent the time to set up a bot and a community and etc. But for the life of me I cant understand why that person wants it.
The stats for the community are interesting too.
185 posts, 28 subscribers (probably 28 repost bots) and 4 comments. **4 ** COMMENTS!
Obviously I’m going to block the community from my feed but It makes for a really bad first time user experience when these bot communities with no interactions are populating the default feed for all new users and guests… Again, I dont know the solution to this either… but it’s definitely a problem.
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.
The NBA bot / thread thing doesnt bother me at all. That sort of content makes sense even if people are not discussing every game. But a lot of these bots are just spamming completely random content with no engagement.
It’s worth discussing though. And again, I dont have a solution. To me it just looks bad. The NBA thing and a few other bot accounts dont really both me as much as this youtube repost bot does just because they dont clutter up the top feeds like this bot does. Not sure even how they are getting into the top feed other than having other bot accounts upvote the content.