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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Personally - I think any bot that could be straight Lemmy functionality shouldn’t exist but that said, I think good ground rules would be :
- Bots should be clearly prompted by a command
- Bots should not act in a community without mods from that community being contacted first
- Bots should minimize the space they take with their messages (Example: Info on how to contact its creator should be in the bot bio rather than in every message)
- Bots should say who made/hosts it
I also vote for these rules!
I agree - these seem to me like very common-sense rules.
Do spoiler foldouts maintain their functionality across UIs, either directly or in essence (eg. popup instead)?
Part of me wishes that Lemmy also had spoilers that reveal in place, but foldout spoilers have some functionality that makes me appreciate having both on hand. I’d bet bots could benefit from using that to minimize visual space if we go through with it.
If they’re informative and/or helpful, I don’t mind bots. If they’re those stupid pointless novelty bots that were plaguing Reddit, they can go away.
The grammar bots were so annoying! I love good grammar as much as anyone, but really, what help are we actually adding to the world with the they’re/their/there bots, the your/you’re bots, the payed/paid bots, etc. I really can’t imagine those changed anyone’s behavior or spelling.
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I’m not completely against those, they sometimes made me edit a comment, and can be educational to both native speakers and those learning the language.
However, it’s not nice to force them upon people, it should be each user’s choice whether they want those tips or not, so I’d say: maybe, but not for Beehaw (unless maybe for some “learn-[some_language]” community).
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.
Maybe there could be a community on Beehaw where people could post about their bots and associated commands, so we could learn how they could be called into threads where they would be helpful?
This could be added to docs.beehaw.org ;)
I think bots can have a place, but I prefer ones that have to be intentionally invoked. I’m thinking of ones like MTGCardFetcher on the Magic the Gathering subreddit, which would post links to the card on Scryfall if you formatted the card name in double brackets in your comment.
In my opinion, such bots indicate more of a need for some kind of easy “pipe” feature to integrate tools to transform a post before publishing, so that all of the tweaks can be done within the post instead of as a bot reply. For example, there could be a “MTG-ify” button that takes the text in the input box, turns the double bracketed names into CommonMark links, and then puts the modified text back into the input box.
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.
If you think all bots should be banned, then good news! On Lemmy, bot accounts are (should be) labeled as a bot, and in your profile settings you can disable seeing posts by bots.
Second this, for Beehaw.
Users can already follow any community from another instance with autoposting bots. With the right interface, users can even merge posts from no-bot and yes-bot communities to create their own customized experience.
Comment bots are mostly fine so long as they are clearly labelled, don’t take up unnecessary amounts of space, have clear purpose and add value to an article or discussion. So stuff like TLDR, Piped, Wiki bots are fine. Stuff like GROND, GPT (even though it’s cool we have a Masto feature that does that), Anakin, Musk bots aren’t useful here imo.
Post bots, I’m kind of on the side of I’d rather not see them, I like talking about articles with the user who posted it. I won’t be too upset if they end up allowed, though. A whitelist, or a strictly enforced guideline would be acceptable for me.
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
Bots can be extremely useful and the flexibility of where and how bots could work was one of the things that made Reddit popular. Before, well, y’know.
Bespoke bots can also allow particular communities to develop local features or functionality. I assume Lemmy’s mod tools are fair bare bones right now too, so I suspect someone, somewhere is probably working on an automod toolkit.
Bots should be allowed, but must be flagged. I don’t know if it’s a default lemmy option, but the app I use has a toggle to hide bot accounts if you don’t want to see them.
That said, I would very much prefer if bots were restricted to just making comments rather than posts. Certain communities have bots that automatically post article links and they completely blanket feeds sorted by new until you block the account.
I’ve started an account on Mastodon recently, and really noticed the bot accounts. If you accidentally follow one of the extremely active bots, all your feed becomes their posts. I don’t think there’s enough people on the Fediverse just yet to be able to drown those bots out when they show up.
😅😅
I kinda wish the ALL feed could be a bit more intelligent. Also, sorry for gunking up your feed!
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 @nitterbot@example.com
- 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
I’m glad ya’ll have made it to where I can easily block them all in the settings. I guess some people like them tho; so that’s a happy medium.
I’m of the opinion that bots are okay if:
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They provide value to the community - A news-bot seems to be well received at tucson.social and it helps people get all their Tucson updates in one place without having to share it themselves.
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They assist with moderation. Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.
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They enhance the dialogue of the thread or provide useful and important corrections. Perhaps there’s a bot that looks up species names and provides useful links in a reply of a zoological based post? I say that’s great and what we want!
As for ChatGPT bots:
- All bots must disclose they are a bot.
- All bots must not fake engagement. As in, it’s okay to be other bots because of their relatively strict use-cases and minimal ability to hallucinate and no ability to respond to further queries. ChatGPT makes it appear as if it’s a person at times and can be subtly wrong - we have people that do that just fine.
- ChatGPT content should go into their own relevant subs. A MachineLearning community might be good at first, but perhaps eventually a dedicated LLM/ChatGPT Writes type community would eventually be needed for peoples more creative impulses. It’s not exactly relevant for someplace like tucson.social, but might be for a place like BeeHaw.
Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.
IMHO those pinned top messages in Reddit were a stopgap for dealing with highly diverse communities and moderation styles “on a single instance”.
Again in my opinion, the Fediverse would benefit more from having consistent rules per-instance, with only sub-rules on a community level. Both of these should be made easily discoverable to all participants of a “community@instance” directly through their interface (web or app), making the pinned top messages unnecessary.
Communities with “highly diverse moderation styles”, should rather stay on separate instances with similar moderation styles, making it easier for mods to apply a consistent ruleset, for users to decide which instances to follow, and admins whether to federate or not. There already exist interfaces (both web and app) to merge communities from multiple instances if the user so wishes to (at their own risk, but again IMHO the rule differences should be handled by the user’s interface).
Ideally, I think that users should be able to use an interface of their own choice to merge comments on a matching post from multiple instances or groups of instances (federated), interacting in whatever style they choose without interfering with users who didn’t choose that style.
Particularly in the case of Beehaw, which has a consistent set of “rules but not rules” for all communities, I think those messages would only add clutter.
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Any bot I can think of is one I can do without. Beehaw is about human communication and while I can see bots eventually being useful currently they are just annoying. I’d like to eventually see them brought in under strict guidelines.
I can see value in a summarization bot or an auto moderator so long as allowing some didn’t turn into a burden on the admin team on which ones to allow.
I think their value can easily be outweighed if there are too many bots providing no value.
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You don’t even have to block them individually. If you uncheck “show bot accounts” in the settings, they are all gone.
Now if it’s a bot account not registered as a bot account, circumventing that setting, that should be banned.
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My thoughts on this is pretty much voiced by some of the others.
For instance, there was a tool that could be used to repost things from a reddit user page. I’ve warned (and the dev have added the warning to the repo itself) that the tool can cause one to be banned. Now the only way I can see that working without inciting a ban is if the tool was triggered by a command, and only took one link at a time. Assuming the mods already gave permission. Something like the wiki bot I’ve seen over on reddit that posted the overview of a wiki link. However, I would rather be able to trigger it with a
!wikior something to that effect.The only exception I would take with this is with an automod that reminds users to include specific things in their posts…but I’m also meh about this. If people post without reading the sidebar, they’re probably not going to bother coming back and reading a comment. This issue would be better solved through other means (a reminder of the community rules in the New Post page, after choosing a community).
The bots 100% need to have the bot tag on. No bots impersonating as people, please.
That’s my 2¢ for now.
