Previously: Submission Statement Edition
Haven’t done these in a while, so let’s get started.
- Since we haven’t really heard any feedback one way or the other, rule 8 is now official. To be fair, we’ve had a lot less microblog posts than I expected (only one Twitter/X post in the last month even after I waited longer than the initial 1-2 weeks expected, and that was a crosspost.)
- Again, the rules are always a work in progress, feel free to give your two cents here whenever you like.
- As you guys know, PipedLinkBot went completely insane 2 days ago and looks like it’s temporarily shut down. So, I’d like to use this opportunity to explain why I banned the bot pretty much immediately after our community reopened. (And gloat a bit, of course)
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Even though I do agree with the principle of using open source, privacy focused frontend instead of using Youtube directly, I have a real problem with using a bot to respond every time somebody posts a Youtube link. It feels like spam, and it doesn’t feel like it serves any utility besides pushing an agenda (even though many people here would agree with it). Most people have seen it around here enough to use pipedvideo if they wanted it to use it already.
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I think it’s always been a rage inducing part of the reddit experience that you see you received a response to your comment, but only have it been a bot smugly correcting your grammar or tell you all your letters are in order or something useless like that. So, for this place, I would like to make sure that everyone you talk to here is a real person as much as possible, because people inspire people to be greater, but bots don’t.
I think PipedLinkBot isn’t all that harmful considering people have the ability to turn off bots in their profile settings if they don’t like them. Perhaps the feature is underused (and perhaps showing bots should be opt-in rather than opt-out) but this level of control is one of the things Lemmy does a lot better than Reddit.
Lemmy and its clients could do with some UI changes to deemphatize bots so they don’t distract from the conversation, but a flat-out ban seems a bit harsh?
Oh well, this is why we have different communities on different servers with different policies, I suppose!
I don’t think the bot is harmful either, it just doesn’t have much value.
The ban message also had a request for the bot’s creator to contact us and address our concerns to get the bot unbanned and put on the whitelist, but we never received a word from them.
For those out of the loop right now, the bot currently banned on LW instance wide (or at least this morning) from responding to itself in an infinite loop on !world@lemmy.world.