The problem is the bots make more posts than there are people willing to comment on anything. The userbase gets fragmented and they never end up in the same post as someone else, there’s 0 actual socializing. People scroll past tons of posts with 0 comments and get frustrated and sometimes they quit. It also discourages real people from making regular posts because they can get drowned out by the bots.
I’d be very curious to see if there’s been any successful Lemmy bot poster that just copies content from Reddit or somewhere else, in a way that people actually enjoy and engage with.
I think you need to respect the natural ratio of people posting and people commenting. Bots screw up that ratio big time and dilute the commenters spread thin, stretched across too many posts. Like butter scraped over too much bread.
Like, the site owners/employees/admins/mods are the only ones who choose what to post(and hopefully not extremely bias and a good spread of topics), but the users can still upvote/downvote the post as well as comment and all that?...
There’s a bot that reposts HN content, but I’m not sure if it has its own community. And if it does, I don’t think there’s any restrictions on posting from users.
Edit: There is !hackernews . It doesn’t limit users from posting though, but I don’t see anyone really posting other than the bot anyway.
I wonder if the bots that are making their own posts (such as the hacker news and reddit X-post bots) should be limited to their own communities. If you want them in your feed, subscribe, otherwise, everyone is ignoring them by default.
!hackernews works that way and I think it’s working well so far.
Does anyone else feel like Lemmy is getting SO MUCH better?!!
Just sayin’
Are there any active news communities similar to Lemmy/Reddit, but users can only vote and comment, not post articles?
Like, the site owners/employees/admins/mods are the only ones who choose what to post(and hopefully not extremely bias and a good spread of topics), but the users can still upvote/downvote the post as well as comment and all that?...
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Do we really need these many posting bots?
Every day I am noticing more and posts by bots....