Asklemmy

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Is the Lemmy experience worsening? How do I block Reddit bots but allow participation? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Note that you will also block useful bots like that.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Laxaria 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] XbSuper 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What kind of bots are you referring to? I have all bots blocked, noe I'm worried I'm missing out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago

There's no such thing as a useful bot. They're all annoying and I'm glad I can block them all.