It seems to me that over the last two weeks, the Lemmy experience has been worsening. My front page and communities are filled with Reddit re-posting bots.
While this gives off a feeling of being active, it’s like a ghost town invaded by AI.
But if I block these bots, I also take the risk that I’m unable to participate in actual conversations between non-bot Lemmy participants.
Removed by mod
Note that you will also block useful bots like that.
Yep, for that reason I’m blocking bots individually. Ideally they’d give repost bots a separate identifier to block them specifically, but that requires the bot-dev to denominate them explicitly. Doubt many would do that.
For the time being the bot account flag is voluntary anyway, so there’s nothing stopping a repost bot from not indicating they are one.
Block and move on is the most straightforward solution at the moment.
What kind of bots are you referring to? I have all bots blocked, noe I’m worried I’m missing out.
Can’t speak for others, but I built two that are generally considered useful, one that fixes links to instances so that they are clickable for everyone. The other bot I made is ChatGPT, you can just summon it and it will reply.
The first is triggered by posting an incorrect link (like https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy) and the other is triggered by mentioning it directly (like @[email protected]). Both should reply to me soon-ish since I triggered them.
Note that the “bad” bots will most likely not advertise they are bots, they will pretend they’re human, only the useful ones (or at least those that their author considers useful) are marked as a bot.
There’s no such thing as a useful bot. They’re all annoying and I’m glad I can block them all.
I haven’t seen anything you have. My defaults are Subscribed > Active, and I usually jump to last hour, 6 hours then 12 hours after which I close Lemmy and go do something else.
It’s a great routine.
This is more of a support question, please see the sidebar for communities that can help you out. Removing under rule #3.
You need to assess each bot. Usually I have a look, see what content they post and how often, and make a decision
I had the same feeling last week on seeing soo many cross posts from reddit.
As the original thread is taking place elsewhere, there seems no point in posting any comments into the lemmy version of it, or for that matter even seeing it.
I thought we were leaving reddit behind - not dragging it with us.
Alternatively, if this is an attempt to archive all the good stuff, shouldn’t the bot bring the comments too?
Just block the bots. Keep the ones that generate a decent amount of conversation.
Filter settings seem to have the biggest effect on my experience, with the default being the worst and seemingly just showing the same stuff for days on end. I haven’t really figured out which of the others is best for seeing new stuff, but ‘New’ or ‘Top 6 hours’ tend to give better results I think. Then it’s been a slow process of blocking communities or users I don’t want to see. Eventually I assume once my subscribed communities hit a certain threshold I can just filter by subscribed, but for me I still have to go by All, since the communities I’m on don’t have a ton of posts coming in.
Memmy finally seems to be taking language into account now, as for about a week or so my feed was filled with foreign-language posts I couldn’t read. Overall, it seems like a bit more work to get a good feed going than that other site we know, but I’m hopeful it will get better over time.
You can also ignore bot postings that don’ t have comments.
