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.
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.