So I purposed that for Lemmy and mastdon a bot that post links to YouTube videos and news articles relevant the city I live in, and I got push back on suggesting the idea. I suggesting this bot because my city isn’t big enough to pump out content everyday and the links would seed content for a Lemmy community so that its not empty.

I have looked into city subReddit and for my city links to news stories are basically non existent and big city like NYC news article links are rare, but do get engagement.

I have been told that link bots don’t help with empty communities and something about redundancy.

I do look at politics community and that’s nothing but links.

I’m asking for general perspective from both sides

  • aasatru@kbin.earth
    1·
    1 day ago

    I think it’s fine as long as:

    1. Your bot is clearly marked as such
    2. It only post to communities where it has explicitly been made welcome, either after you talking to the admins or in a community you run

    A lot of people, myself included, are hesitant to take the time to look at content if nobody took the time to manually share it. But for a use-case like you mentioned, for a local community that is too small to be established naturally any time soon, I think it could make sense. Especially for local news — YouTube videos should maybe still go through a human screening before being shared.

    That’s my five cents, anyway. :)

  • FundMECFS@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    21 hours ago

    If you want to make the community feel non-empty. Make the bot post maximum once every week or two.

    Anything more than that and the community will feel empty in another way. Because it’ll just be repetitive posts from a single account with barely any upvotes or comments as far as the eye can see. Like look at communities like [email protected]. The excessive botposting with no upvotes or comments makes it feel basically more empty than anything.

    I’m not against bots to populate, but prioritise quality over quantity.

    • PixelPilgrim@lemmings.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      16 hours ago

      Hmmm 1-2 per week. I patched my open source bot to post to Lemmy. The patch is for leaderboard for which streamer has the most streams and most hours streamed in the past week/day . I decided twice a day for that.

      I guess I’ll do 1 a week for my cities’ community.

      I am trying to build up fediverse streamers (a lot of owncast and a little bit of peertube) to add fediverse engagement. So I made a bot that post to mastdon of who streams the most, etc. I just made the community for the fediverse streamers. Hopefully it’s more content for fedizens to interact with

  • Chris@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    I have one running in [email protected] as otherwise there would be nothing in it other than the odd article I’d post manually. The idea is that I will remove it if the community grows enough that the bot is just adding noise. At the moment there’s minimal engagement, but I find it useful as I see the local news rather than looking for it elsewhere and having to post it.