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.
I blocked two bots yesterday, bot and botrss or something and my feed is so much better.
I feel a lot like you and how you described your position in the first paragraph. I’m in boat 2 but understand boat 1.
But seeing reposts from Reddit isn’t always doing it in most cases. A bunch of reposts from /r/AmITheAsshole is okay, but then I miss all the context from the OP in the comments. I guess reading the crazy story is cool on it’s own sometimes. And then there’s no point in participating in the discussion here because no one else is doing it and it never gets back to the OP.
A sub about showcasing cool cars getting reposted here would be different because you’re just there to view the cool pictures.
But the bot reposts dominated my feed too much for me to see much of anything else. I see enough original posts here now that it makes up for it.
We’re in agreement, but I’m more militant for the specific example (amitheasshole).
It’s right in the name. If there is no “I” directly involved, than the bot is an asshole. Sprinkle this philosophy liberally when expanding scope to almost all bot content, and it encompasses my opinion with scant few exceptions.