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Why are there so many bots all lemmy?
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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We're trying to build communities. A good way to do it is to have bots post content, so there's stuff to see on our feeds.
It's always a balancing act that doesn't work for everybody. But the beauty here is that each individual can curate their own feed.
Edit: I misspoke, I'm not someone who actively uses of promotes bot use. I just remember people talking about this discussion previously and this was a justification used. OP asked a question, I provided an answer. It's not MY answer, but it's still one. Don't shoot the messenger.
It rubs me the wrong way tbh, because it doesn’t feel authentic at all
+1 I Have blocked a good number of these.
That's entirely understandable. That's the thing, though. It's hard to have a community grow on its own, organically, in these times. A large majority of users are rather passive, they don't actively contribute by posting or commenting so much. If they don't get enough content on a topic/community, they'll forget it exists.
So, to build a community, you get a bot to "seed" it with content until enough people know it exists and contribute stuff themselves.
It's weird and fucked and, unfortunately, it's the world we live in now.
I disagree, it just leads to spam and people blocking the bots, and therefore the communities. I think things will grow organically at whatever speed. People have to realise this isn't Reddit, and likely won't ever be as big, and that it's good that it won't be.
Yes, I've blocked a number of start up communities because they've flooded my feed with posts. Some of them even seemed interesting and I subscribed...only to immediately unsubscribe and block after seeing it has 10 posts an hour with 0 engagement.
No it won't. Social networks require a critical mass to get started. It's why platforms like Uber throw money at drivers and consumers at the start - without a critical mass, it won't work. Spez and his team had conversations with each other using sock puppet accounts during the early days of Reddit.
Fair enough, I feel that there are enough people on Lemmy now that it is past the getting started phase though. If new people come on and see bot after bot I feel that it will be a worse experience than having fewer communities with organic engagement.
I think this is disingenuous at best. You are creating a ton of content no one cares about and the result is that people are not only blocking the bot but also blocking the bot community. So if you are doing this to "create a community" the result, from my perspective, is that you are aborting the community before it ever gets a chance to start. I know that I wont subscribe to a bot community nor will I in the future go back and check out those communities to see if they are still bots. They are just dead to me at that point.
I block every bot and every bot spam community. We don't need fake shit here. This isn't Reddit.
There's always ups and downs with everything. By using bots you might get subscribers, but people like me who don't agree with being force fed robot spam will actively avoid such subs.
In fact I find it so disagreeable I refuse to donate resources so people can host spam on my instance instead of actually posting content themselves.
I would not like to be part of a community that finds auto-generated content to be of an acceptable quality.
I think the effect here is more good than bad. Nobody wants to post to a community that's just bot spam. You're trying to skip the small community phase in favor of faking being a previous community with bots, but that phase is essential for community development and cohesion.