/r/programming came back up two days ago and as far as I can tell everything relating to the blackout was wiped. I kinda expected it since spez was admin.
Another thing that surprised me was how much chatGPT bot spam there is (danm it is so so bad, wonder what the mods are doing over there… ah yes, spez).
I used to sort by hot so it was hidden away a bit for me before.
Anyways I hope Lemmy does not fall into the same pitfalls!
goes back into lurk mode
We must prevent these kinds of bots on getting a foothold here.
I acknowledge that we do have bots here [lemmy], reposting top posts from reddit. As we grow in number. We must also scale down these bots until the day that only moderating related bots are existing in our ecosystem.
What’s the point of those bots? There’s no karma to farm on Lemmy.
What is the point in farming karma at all?
There already is some ChatGPT bot and I see people bringing it into threads sometimes. I downvote almost every person who does so, as I’ve yet to see a single case where it was actually asked for or meaningfully contributed.
I want more communities to have rules against unsolicited AI comments and for them to better enforce them (one of the cases I’m referring to was in a community that already had a rule against AI comments, but the comment had still been up for a while and had been upvoted).
As i argued in another comment, there are many useful bots for certain niche communities that I really think have a place here, even though I am generally wary of AI accounts infesting the fediverse as well.
Good examples for good and very useful, yet not mod work related bots are on TCG/CCG subs like magic the gathering and hearthstone to provide context to card names, or convert deck codes into a nicely formatted table of the used cards. Or on the Lego sub, returning any set number as a link to the proper bricklink entry. This kind of bot should be allowed and even encouraged to be used where appropriate.
Then there are the plenty of irrelevant and annoying bots we really can do without, like the alphabetical order bot, haiku bot, the dozens of bots quoting LOTR or Star Wars characters, and so on. Like most reddit jokes they stopped being funny fairly quickly and now add nothing to the conversation, but are being kept around for karma.
And then there are the more insidious bots that are about to become widespread, being harder to detect the more their refinement advances. It is going to be a constant arms race between bot detection and bot deception skills.