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.
IMO the post bots and bot-only communities should be on their own dedicated instances, and the communities should be labeled that they are bot communities - right in the name.
Then people shouldn’t think twice if they want to copy content from a bot and post it in a “real” community for discussion - especially content that is just a link to a video or an article. It would be weird to do that with story content copied from Reddit (like AITA.) But for links and even some questions and discussion posts, they deserve views and replies.
That way the repost bots would actually serve a purpose and generate “real” content without using resources from “real” instances.
But I feel the bots as they currently operate are actually stifling content that should be posted be real people. e.g. someone finds an article, but sees it was already posted by a bot, so they don’t post it while the bot’s article falls off the page because no one replies or half of users have them blocked.
I mostly support this opinion. Bot-only communities should not be allowed on lemm.ee instance. We can add this to instance rules and throw out such communities.
I’m not against repost bots per se, but I’d allow them only if a community has more people posts than bot posts.