I think this is great, thank you for doing this. The bots that just repost content from Reddit are useless. Generates zero discussion. Especially the ones that copy content from AITA or other similar communities. If the OP is not there to answer questions or respond, what’s the point?

Yeah, the repost bots just don't work. Reading the comments is half the fun of using reddit/lemmy, but lemmy has a very small userbase still, so the comments are a little bit slow moving. Having a ton of reposts suddenly spammed in splits that small comment activity up to the point where comments basically don't exist and you're viewing a slideshow of empty threads.

When I see a community that is all bot generated content from Reddit, it's an instablock for me. Thanks for cracking down.

Sorry to hear about your personal situation, but that is quite the silver lining and I am sure Lemmy as a whole will benefit greatly from it. Solid ruleset on bots as well. We are currently rolling out rules about bots on Lemmy World, reading this we might have to go over some of them again. We don't want to stomp out all bots because some are problematic.

🫶 from Lemmy World

Thank you thank you thank you! I was just feeling extremely annoyed last night when my entire feed was nothing but YouTube reposts from a bot. If that's what I wanted to look at, I would just go to YouTube. I think this will be an overall very positive change.

Great news, honestly! I rather have less content, but actual interaction than all those bots reposting.

And I’ll try to check out your stream, sounds really interesting! Hopefully my internet will be also agree, haha

Lemm.ee and @[email protected] have been rocking it from day 1. You take good care of your community, Ty.

I'm all for post that generate discussion and interest. Repost bots do none of that so let's get rid of them...

Fine by me. I've already blocked a few bot accounts that were spam posting

I for one fully support this course of action. I’ve been blocking these bots left and right to keep my Local feed from being completely cluttered with posts that aren’t generating engagement, but I’d be more than happy to not need to.

Some bot content is okay, but I agree it should be moderated. Thanks for your effort on this, no disagreement.

Also, thanks for your contributions to making Lemmy great!

Thank you again. I've had some issues with bots taking over my feeds. Zero engagement bots dont seem to have a place though I can understand the appeal of them for archiving.

I'm all for this!

sounds good

Bots should not be responsible for the majority of content in any community

I think this could maybe be qualified a little bit. I think of communities like /r/news or /r/worldnews, and they are quite largely just links from other news sources, that are then discussed, and they're a type of community I myself really valued from reddit, before moving here.

I don't think the argument is fair that you should just use RSS if you want aggregation, communities focused on "link aggregation" (which is what Lemmy is on paper, is it not? a "link aggregator"?) provide SO much more. Off the top of my head, communities and community discussion can bypass paywalls, identify misleading headlines, point out related stories or context... I don't see the problem with communities like this having links seeded by bots. One could argue it actually helps fight bias.

I am 100% on board with ditching all the reddit-scraping bots. Reddit posts are not primary sources of anything.

All these rules seem sensible and should crack down on bot content. Thanks for thinking this out.

Ahh I'm not going to catch this live but would love to see this. You've done so much to help out with Lemmy (and helped me personally with my instance!) So super interested to see this.

Repost bots need to be regulated in volume. Otherwise this instance becomes an aggregator, and we already have RSS for that.

I really think the "simple" approach of categorizing bot VS non-bot and federate vs defederate are only masking the underlying problem : all posts do not have the same amount of "value".

However, with Lemmy they do. And I think this is what's broken. If you or anyone in the community has time or interest, I think focusing on rewriting the "what's hot" algorithm would reduce/remove many of these "workarounds" (like the one you're suggesting).

(I'm just thinking out loud) but a better "what's hot" would have each post weighted:

1. Against the number of people subscribed to a channel (more subscribers == more relevance)
2. Against the average number of comments by different users/ post / community. (many comments from different users == more relevant) This would implicitly address the issue of bot spam, that you mentioned.
3. An upper limit on new topics / community. This would avoid the meme community from hijacking all of "what's hot".

Of course this cannot all be done in real time. Things like "average number of comments per post" could be precalculated daily, but I think it'll be "good enough" and a radical improvement to what Lemmy currently offers.

EDIT: I guess I hadn't looked for more webcomic communities in a while and there are more available now which have people actually posting OC to instead of just reposting from elsewhere with no discussion. I'll leave my original comment below regardless.

I'm of mixed opinion about this. I only subscribe to one bot-led community ([email protected]) and whilst I hate that every comic is just reposted from Reddit by the bot and so has no comments or discussion, it seems that no comic creators are posting to Lemmy yet and so I would rather still be able to see the content they are creating than miss it entirely. I understand that both the community and the bot are hosted on lemmit.online so they won't be affected by the bot policy of lemm.ee but it still speaks to the problem of lack of content posted to Lemmy in general (at least in certain communities).

Thank you.

I'm all for pretty much all of these changes. The only thing I'd give feedback on is specifically this line.

Bots should not have a disruptive influence on a community

I think this needs a clear definition, before I can say that I agree with that.

Just my thoughts.

Will it still be possible to view posts by bots on different instances? Kbin.social blocks these from being visible as far as I recall

One of the anime communities utilises a bot to generate discussion posts with links to relevant information as episodes come out for convenience, given the purpose of the community being for discussions, would this be another legitimate use that the rules could account for?

A very insightful explanation of something that I think sorely needed addressing. Thank you for doing this.

I support these new rules.

If you browse lemm.ee not logged in at the time of this comment all you see are pages of bots reposting reddit threads. There's no way anyone that sees that decides "oh this place is cool, I'm going to sign up".

This will be great. I spend enough time trying to block these bots, so excited to save a little time.

Sounds like a great policy!

I think this might be useful for some kind of automatic aggregation of content from other communities or some specific cases. For example, I liked, when I was on reddit, the subreddit RedditRead on which each post was generated from other subreddit comments, one post by book found in the comment on a specific post in another subreddit. I thought about setting up the same here when I have a bit more time... Now, the posts would be all generated but users could still comments, so it's not purely artificial stuff...

Maybe one alternative would be to authorize such bot content generated communities but clearly flags them as such in the community sidebar or so. So people who are ok with generated content can subscribe and those who don't like can block.

In a general way, I have bad feeling about strong rules (except for stuff obviously wrong or destructive but here I don't think it's the case), and prefer case by case monitoring. In some cases it can be good for the community and in other very bad, and I find that saying just "it's forbidden" is too easy and frustrating decision.

I watch Kitboga's coding streams!! And they're very low key as well. I think it's an awesome idea!

I have found the reddit bots a bit annoying. Not to say I don't want to ever see a reddit link on lemmy, but the communities that are essentially a clone of a subreddit seems kind of pointless. I might as well have stayed on reddit then. So I would love to see those bots go away, or get moved into their own community. But overall, I agree that we should cut down on bit posts. I'd rather see discussion rather than dumps of links.

One thing I've noticed, setting your account settings to exclude bots doesn't always prevent bots from showing up in the feed.

We really should add a "dont contribute to metrics" and "metrics meed to be above X to be shown in Y" option applyabe to your posts or via the API