We’re trying to build communities. A good way to do it is to have bots post content, so there’s stuff to see on our feeds.
There’s always ups and downs with everything. By using bots you might get subscribers, but people like me who don’t agree with being force fed robot spam will actively avoid such subs.
In fact I find it so disagreeable I refuse to donate resources so people can host spam on my instance instead of actually posting content themselves.
I would not like to be part of a community that finds auto-generated content to be of an acceptable quality.
Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It rubs me the wrong way tbh, because it doesn’t feel authentic at all
Engywuck@lemm.ee 1 year ago
+1 I Have blocked a good number of these.
Decoy321@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s entirely understandable. That’s the thing, though. It’s hard to have a community grow on its own, organically, in these times. A large majority of users are rather passive, they don’t actively contribute by posting or commenting so much. If they don’t get enough content on a topic/community, they’ll forget it exists.
So, to build a community, you get a bot to “seed” it with content until enough people know it exists and contribute stuff themselves.
It’s weird and fucked and, unfortunately, it’s the world we live in now.
kd637_mi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I disagree, it just leads to spam and people blocking the bots, and therefore the communities. I think things will grow organically at whatever speed. People have to realise this isn’t Reddit, and likely won’t ever be as big, and that it’s good that it won’t be.
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Yes, I’ve blocked a number of start up communities because they’ve flooded my feed with posts. Some of them even seemed interesting and I subscribed…only to immediately unsubscribe and block after seeing it has 10 posts an hour with 0 engagement.
eee@lemm.ee 1 year ago
No it won’t. Social networks require a critical mass to get started. It’s why platforms like Uber throw money at drivers and consumers at the start - without a critical mass, it won’t work. Spez and his team had conversations with each other using sock puppet accounts during the early days of Reddit.
Master@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I think this is disingenuous at best. You are creating a ton of content no one cares about and the result is that people are not only blocking the bot but also blocking the bot community. So if you are doing this to “create a community” the result, from my perspective, is that you are aborting the community before it ever gets a chance to start. I know that I wont subscribe to a bot community nor will I in the future go back and check out those communities to see if they are still bots. They are just dead to me at that point.