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

  • TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    This makes sense, but I think that Lemmy just has this same problem on a different scale (between instances rather than between communities). The problem we have seen sometimes is folks seeing Beehaw posts in the All feed of their home instance and coming in and commenting/posting without knowing what/who we are and without engaging with the sidebar or any of our docs. And some federated sites make it difficult to even tell that you are seeing a post from another instance (I’m looking at you, Kbin). The vast majority of the time it isn’t a huge problem, but it does mean that the mods are having the same conversation over and over because some folks aren’t aware of the vibe of the place where they’re posting.

    Now obviously an automatic bot comment would be a band-aid, and I suspect not a particularly effective one (Lemmy doesn’t provide the ability to sticky comments). It would be ideal if there was some functionality built into Lemmy itself to remind users of the instance they are about to post in, and the rules of that instance.

    • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      an automatic bot comment would be a band-aid

      I’d kind of rather they get this as a direct message or even better a warning on the UI they interact with our site on (we cannot enforce the latter).

      • TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I had been thinking that a better solution would be some built in Lemmy functionality - I think Reddit actually had a reminder like this on posts, but not comments - but between apps, third-party front ends, and federation with other services like Mastodon and Kbin it probably wouldn’t reach the folks that would most need to be reminded of the rules of the place they’re posting in.