Hello everyone,
I am one of the moderators of [email protected]. We use a bot relying on https://schedule.lemmings.world/ to create a post every day automatically.
I know that some users block bots because they consider them annoying, be it repost posts or features bots such as tldr or piped. Having the bot labelled as such prevents the daily threads from being viewed by users who might be interested.
I had that reasoning in the past, but had the bot banned for not complying with the instance guidelines.
I thus open this thread to see what could be done to solve this issue. Could there be exceptions to the bot labelling guidelines in this kind of cases?
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Bots are bots. If I want to filter them I should be able to.
Manually create the threads as a user if you want to enable everyone to see it
What is the limit between a bot and a user?
If I create the post using a script on my computer, is that a bot, or a user?
Should I hire someone to press the post button everyday to make it a post from a user?
If you press the submit button = User
If you tell something else to press the submit button = bot
The bot posts a daily thread titled “How are you doing today?”, everyday. Not really the type of important information worthy of overriding users preferences to not see bot posts.
How would it be different if Lemmy allowed scheduled post creation in the platform itself? It seems more like a workaround to a feature missing than the bot reposts people usually complain about.
The fact that the daily post isn’t that interesting, I get it, it’s not for everyone, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with it being done by a bot.
You’re trying to look at this in a way to get the answer you want. It’s simple, is it a bot? Yes. Nothing else matters after that answer.
A bot is a bot and should be marked as such. No exceptions.
As an alternative, the devs could add the option to whitelist specific bots, so people can first “block all bots” and then make an exception specifically for yours - IF they want to see it, of course. But unmarking a bot just because you want to show it to people who specifically do NOT want to see any bots? That defeats the entire purpose of blocking them in the first place.
How would it be different if Lemmy allowed scheduled post creation in the platform itself? It seems more like a workaround to a feature missing than the bot reposts people usually complain about.
The fact that the daily post isn’t that interesting, I get it, it’s not for everyone, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with it being done by a bot.
Edit: The issues I’m trying to solve is mostly people unaware of the bot, potentially interested in the daily thread (because after all, why not) and not seeing it due to them blocking them all. So, it’s not showing content to people who don’t want to see it, it’s showing it to people who might be interested.
The fact that the daily post isn’t that interesting, I get it, it’s not for everyone, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with it being done by a bot.
Then apparently you don’t get it. It’s a bot, preprogrammed bits of code to do drudgework (or worse) like reminders and repetitive posting. Some users aren’t interested in reminders, repetitive posts or bot posting in general and all your exuberance and enthusiasm won’t change that. Me personally, I’m glad the label exists, used honestly of course, as I’m not usually fond of bot posts, such as that summarizer nor the YouTube redirector.
Stupid as it may be at times, I like human interaction.
🤝
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How would it be different if Lemmy allowed scheduled post creation in the platform itself?
It wouldn’t be different. Still annoying useless spam, still something I would immediatly block. It doesn’t matter much whether it is a bot, a person copypasting the same thing daily, or something different entirely - it is daily spam that a lot of people simply do not want to deal with, and blocking bots gets rid of a lot of this stuff easily.
The METHOD with which the spam is posted is not the issue here, and finding a different way to automate spam is not the solution. Un-marking bots like these would only result in the necessity to manually add bot accounts to a block list to get rid of them again, but it would not magically make people interested in the spam in question just because it is shoved down their throats in a different manner.
Seriously, if you’re only trying to make the bot visible to users who specifically, definitely, actively WANT to see it, then a customizable whitelist is the best option. That way, the “I don’t want ANY bot spam” people aren’t forced to deal with random exceptions, and the people who want to see the bot for whatever reason would be able to.
…mostly people unaware of the bot, potentially interested in the daily thread (because after all, why not) and not seeing it due to them blocking them all.
Stickied intro post in the community. “Hey just so you know, we have a bot asking you how you’re doing every single day, and I’d like you to participate, so please uncheck the bot-block-box in your settings, thank you very much.”
Tadah, now people will be aware about the bot and can opt-in IF they want to, without annoying the rest of the Fediverse in the process.
That community looks neat, subscribed!
But i’m not too sure how I feel about the bot being unlabeled as such, some users will want their lemmy experience to be 100% heart beating human, not some of it be transistor switching bots.
I personally keep bots visible, and just block what I don’t want to see… If a user has blocked all bots then they would probably know the implications.
If you want to run a daily thread for conversations which isn’t tagged as a bot, it would be nicer to create it manually, where the title and description has a personalised touch with how you’re doing etc, instead of a schedule bot pre-filling these from a template
If you want to run a daily thread for conversations which isn’t tagged as a bot, it would be nicer to create it manually, where the title and description has a personalised touch with how you’re doing
Sounds nice, would you like to do this? I can add you to the mod team right away
It’s something I can take up to some extent, less so at the moment though due to work and trying to get myself into a routine lol.
I have a local lemmy.world account @[email protected] which would be more ideal than this remote one
I do have some additional questions and potential ideas - an immediate concern would be myself getting blocked by users who blocked the bot to hide the daily threads 😂 so ideally would want to make sure the new human-posted “how are you doing” threads actually bring value to users rather than encourage a handful of the 6k subs to block me lol.
Could ask the community what their thoughts on the existing daily thread are - it looks like a great discussion starter to me personally, after looking at a handful they have a noticeable following with a few common users
No.
Hey there! Not sure you ever solved this and I realize this is a rather old post, but you can always use your non-bot account with the Scheduler. I do it that way.
It would be nice if you could have more than one category of bot. There is a huge difference between a bot which makes regular posts like daily threads which are part of the organisational structure of a group and bots which crawl through content to make replies, reposts etc. Even just a difference between general bots and ones which are also moderators of the group would help.
I chose to not label the bot I use to create daily posts, not because I want to stop people being able to filter it out (if they want to they can just block the bot easily enough), but because I don’t want to remove the ability of people in my group to filter other bots. Given that the group consists almost entirely of chat in automatically posted daily threads by marking the bot as a bot I would be effectively forcing people to chose between participating in the group and blocking more general bots.
