Hi,
I don’t post this to be malicious or rude, but simply out of concern.
I believe this bot is killing community growth on Lemmy. I keep coming across would-be-interesting communities only to find a wall of bot posts with zero comments, zero votes, zero engagement. And I walk away disappointed instead of getting into a new community. As, I’m sure, may other users are doing.
Sure, you say, “just block the bot” if I don’t like it. But that doesn’t stop this thing from stifling any real engagement and growth in communities. Surely if someone can “just…”, you can “just” go back to reddit if you want to read reddit content that badly.
I admire the engineering you put into making this thing work. It’s impressive, and honestly very cool. But I really think it’s actively disengaging users, when Lemmy has enough of a hurdle to overcome in growing new communities.
Thats just my 2 cents. I’m not sure it will mean much, but I felt I had to share it. Again, no ill intent against what you’ve accomplished in creating this. Best wishes.
Point taken and no offense taken. Hell, I’ve been thinking about this for some time myself as well.
For now I have disabled the requesting of new subreddits/communities, and tightened the upvote filter to be at least 10 and have an 80% upvote ratio. It’s not much, but it should limit the amount unpopular posts somewhat.
Next step is to go through the list of communities and purge all the “ghost communities” - ones that rely heavily on community participation, like for example AskReddit (221 subscribers). It’s going to be tricky to make that selection though. What to do, for example, with [email protected]? With 1100 subscribers, it’s the most popular community on this server. Clearly people are getting something out of it, even though there are no replies to it.
I guess I’ll have to figure something out.