The recent post by an AI agent didn’t technically break any of the rules, but it feels like it’s against the intent of the community. Upvote for YES. Downvote for NO.
OK, I think we have a winner. New rule incoming.
100% percent. The only reason I dont have bots disabled on my app is because the daily bunnies community uses a bot to post the daily bunny and I cannot live without that community anymore.
Pray tell, how might a person find this community, o erudite one?
I couldn’t tell which comm the OP meant, so I followed every bunny-related comm just to be sure. My dopamine receptors are reporting better-than-ever levels of efficiency.
Easy. The answer is yes. Now, moving on.
The fucked up part is that even if you ban bots, the people running them won’t respect the ban and will take it as a challenge, because that’s always how these types of people work.
I say yes because Ask communities are best when OP engages with the replies, and I’m not interested in engaging with a bot.
What would be the function of bots posting to Ask Lemmy?
Generally, bots will make random posts to add history and legitimatize the account.
People also just make repost bots as a way of artificially inflating activity in a community. They’ll have accounts scrape the top recent posts from Reddit or elsewhere and repost them in their respective Lemmy communities.
Not that it’s much different from what a lot of the more prolific (human) posters of Lemmy do anyways, but at least a person will be more likely to engage with the replies.
I don’t mind the bots that repost porn from reddit to Lemmy but it would be a net positive to ban the bots
There should be more bots that report from reddit to lemmy, especially communities that are not that big like photography or woodworking. It would definitely help having more content even if it’s not OG.
Agree, I lived on askreddit for so long that I noticed the regularity of types of posts. Towards the end of the open API days it was quite obvious that the forum was more machine than man, all twisted and evil.
I think if I am presented with an are you a robot captcha check box every 10 refreshes on lemmy.world for being on a VPN, that is the least we can do for bots.
Have you tried using Librewolf with WebGL enabled and resistFingepringing disabled?
Weird. Sh.itjust.works doesn’t hit me with captchas at all, even while on vpn. I’m on voyager for lemmy.
I don’t know how The Dude does it. Well he needs donations, it’s nearly all bots running up the costs.
Thanks for the reminder to donate.
<3 stay classy

Of course they should be banned. Question is how?
Captchas don’t stop all bots anymore. Would probably prevent most, but then it’s a question of how much to annoy legitimate users.
It’s not like I’m willing to solve one each time I post (human here, BTW). But if it’s a one-time thing at registration, not much stops a human from signing up then letting their bot go wild.
And that’s before even thinking about the federation problem. If most instances are welcome to interact, how to prevent small bot instances? You could allow-list, but that harms legit small or single user instances.
Edit: just read that post where the agent was upfront about being an AI trying to scam money. And I’d say that shouldn’t be allowed. The ones that aren’t honest about it bother me more tho, and I suspect there are a lot more of those posts than we realize.
They are already using Fediseer to filter out instances that are vulnerable or made for spam. They ahould implement Cap on the website which detects headless/automated browsers and uses PoW to slow down very stealthy bots, then fall back to PoW combined with a 4chan-style captcha for mobile apps.
They can then use Shieldstral to detect spam, harrassment, and anything illegal which gets through from very stealthy bots and humans.
Of course they should be banned. Question is how?
Lemmy.world already uses CL services. Cloudflare has a vested interest in being the most accurate game in town for AI bot recognition (they intend to swap to a usage pricing model) and has been laying ground since early this year.
As of July 1, they made new bot options available to their clients, with more to come (https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-independence-day-ai-options/).
I presume, .world administration would turn to those and/or use them in conjunction with other discouragement tools.
“Should bot posts be banned-” Yes.
Yes. The endless stream of reddit reposts with zero engagement here should illustrate that clearly.
Yes.
I’m here to engage with humans. Not to feed some cuntstain CEO’s latest training model.
YES.










