How do you all feel about bots?
I’ve seen a gpt powered summarization bot pop up recently. Do you find this useful? Do you hate this?
Do you think bots serve any useful purposes on this website or do you think we should ban all bots? Should we have a set of rules for how bots should interact - only when called, needing to explicitly call out they are a bot on their profile, etc?
I’d love to hear your thoughts
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spoiler
sdfsaf
My opinion is that bots should be classed by how they operate.
Summoned bots should be mostly free of restriction. If it needs someone to explicitly summon it, then the onus is on them to not needlessly summon bots. Requiring explicit
Keyword/auto-summon bots should at a minimum be required to implement easy user/community/instance opt-out. I think the most viable would be allowing auto-summon only when explicitly allowed by the user, community, or instance, but allow them to reply to manual summons without restrictions.
So how it would work is if someone had a bot that would, for example, post Nitter links in response to Twitter links, it would be allowed to:
- Respond to @[email protected]
- Respond on posts by someone who’s indicated they want the bot to auto-reply to their posts
- Respond to posts on a community that allows the bot to do so
Honestly, as a programmer, I’d like the freedom to share bots that can benefit the community. Although, I do think that there should be measures in place to ensure bots don’t degrade the quality of the community.
One of the things I like about Beehaw is the lack of bot posts in every thread. Personally I think all bots should be banned because it eliminates some unwanted spam, but a good compromise for me is that bots be explicitly labeled, and can only respond to a trigger command. Nothing that auto posts.
I’m in favor of the guidelines listed by @Lionir for bots operating on Beehaw. Particularly the part about contacting community mods before deploying - it feels like the nice thing to do before adding new wrinkles to the moderation workload (which includes monitoring discussions about the appearance of the bots). That also provides an opportunity for a discussion within the community to engage with, or pre-emptively disengage from the bot account should they choose, rather than having to do it in the spur of the moment.
Direct link to Lionir’s comment on bots - it’s very near your comment in the discussion right now, but adding a link just in case these drift apart.
I appreciate you doing that, thank you
I like summary bots, summoned bots that serve a purpose, and meme bots if they stay in specific communities where they are expected to be. All bots should self identify.
I could be mistaken but doesn’t Lemmy just have a setting for the user to not see bot posts?
I also figure users can block specific bots if they don’t like them.
98% of bots are crap. The problem is that people have different opinions as to which 98% of them is the crap portion.
Absolutely any bot needs to self-identify.
