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How does Tildes feel about bots?
Bots can be fun, helpful, entertaining etc. but they also contribute, directly or indirectly, to low quality content. Once the API is ready, should/will bots be allowed?
Bots can be fun, helpful, entertaining etc. but they also contribute, directly or indirectly, to low quality content. Once the API is ready, should/will bots be allowed?
I feel like low-effort comment bots (looking at you, common misspelling bot) should not be allowed.
Bots should face the same restrictions as users: be nice and make a contribution to the discussion/community. I personally like the idea of giving them a
bottag next to their name as well, to denote that something is, in fact, a bot.I like the idea of having a tag next to the user, yet I feel like we should treat bots the same as actual users. Bots should first be allowed to do what they will (to a reasonable extent). After the bot has received a certain amount of user tags, it should be labeled as, say, a joke bot, or an offtopic bot, and should, therefore, be filtered out alongside similar bots if the users desire to do so.
If the bot gets very little votes after a long time of being active, its general usefulness to discussions should come up for review. If it is decided that the bot has very little usefulness to Tildes it should be discarded.
Why? What benefit is there to having a bot be treated the same way?
Because a bot may very well be useful to the general community, and many programmers undoubtedly want to use the bots to bring some sort of "plus" to discussions. It would be good to assume that the bot could add to a community until proven wrong.
But how does a bot tag deter that?
Fun fact: there are 10 downvote bots that automatically downvote CommonMisspellingBot instantly upon commenting. I think the designer is going to get shadow banned if Redmins get their shit together.
That bot is bad, but stop and think for a moment. Do you really hate it because it's bad, or are you following the groupthink that goes with seeing mass downvotes?
I hate the concept personally but it wasn't that bad...
I hate it’s because it’s bad - it’s just a nuisance on everything I see. If it was more compact and didn’t literally take up an entire mobile screen I’d mind it less.
I’m a grammar nazi, but you won’t see me going and correcting every single little misspelling there is.
To tell everyone that you made a mistake?
Yes, and to help people learn the correct way to spell commonly misspelled words.
Why is spreading knowledge so bad?
Spreading knowledge is good, random spreading of knowledge in a manner that derails discussion is bad.
I don't see having a misspelling corrected as derailing conversations. What I do see is salty people who are embarrassed to have been corrected.
Not to mention that positive responses to the not derail the conversation as well... there's no winning.
So you're advocating (in a way) to limit bots to.. prevent embarrassment? Even if that bot were not a thing here, I guarantee you that someone (human) would eventually start correcting the same stuff.
It's human nature to do so, someone just automated it.
So.. Tildes is supposed to be for serious discussion, yet if someone in all seriousness corrects someone's grammar or spelling, it might be removed?
I could see that peeving off some users who might otherwise have great content to contribute.
For one, I find it hard to take someone seriously - especially in a serious discussion - with obvious misspellings in their posts. To me, if they don't care enough to check their spelling, then everything else is suspect.
So than you shouldn't want a spelling bot, how will you know who not to take seriously?
In a strange way, when the misspellings bot calls someone out, especially after I see their reaction to it, it gives me insight into how much weight I should give a person's comments.
Not necessarily removed, but at least tagged...
So do you not have a problem with bots in general, or are you only fine with a bot that corrects misspellings?
In general, I don't have a problem with bots that are helpful. I consider seeing corrected spellings helpful. Bots that spew random [animal] facts, while funny, are not helpful.
But if they do not derail the conversation, who cares if they are helpful or not?
Fine with me, but I don't really see it being possible to make an unhelpful bot that doesn't derail conversation eventually.
And I don't really see it being possible to make a helpful bot that doesn't derail conversation eventually.
If you thinks bots are fine even if they derail conversation I'm good with that, but to deny that they do seems a little incredible to me.
I think we're getting into the weeds here.
Do you consider a bot like RemindMe to be helpful? What about a bot that converts mobile links to non-mobile versions for desktop users?
Those, in addition to the spelling correction bot, are ones that I consider helpful, and would not mind seeing.
I consider them helpful, yet they are distracting, hence this post.
So you want helpful bots, yet without distraction. How would you accomplish that?
RemindMe can interact via PMs (and does), but the mobile link converter bot can't do that.
First of all I never said I want them, I said I consider them helpful. With that said, if you read the other comments on this post you will see a couple different suggestions how to go about having bots without the distraction.
I have already read the comments, thanks.
All I saw of substance were suggestions that they should be tagged.
There were also suggestions along the lines of having bots but keeping any conversation with them invisible, or similarly integrating bot like features into the site.
Integrating them into the site would seem to be extremely obvious, especially considering that Tildes is looking to control (or guide, if you prefer) the discourse to raise its quality level.
Also, I don't see how keeping bot conversations invisible would work, for example, with bots that convert mobile links to desktop links, or bots that expand small links to be more easily clickable on mobile. Those are just two examples of many.
Those are some ideas that will solve some of the problems, I don't think any one person has the solution to all problems.
I hate the bots because they're spam. I hate spam.
what about bots that are actually useful?
Spam can be useful too, overall it is not though.
Common misspelling bot is a valuable addition to an increasingly illiterate society and should be baked in to the infrastructure of the internet. Fight me.
I think we can adopt IRC-like mode, a user can post long text response, a bot can reply one-liner "notifications" with a fixed format.
Also multiple bot replies can be automatically merged/collapsed with a format.
There are some novel bots that are neat but they have invaded every subreddit and are as invasive as mobile ads at this point, breaking up discussions and then having good bot or bad bot responses.
Having bot accounts with bot in the name and a setting to turn them on or off would be ideal, and probably disabled by default if it was up to me!
I would love the ability to toggle seeing bots based on categories
That's a great idea. I really enjoy some of the bots, they're really funny sometimes, but I can totally see how they can be annoying. Plus, some bots are actually really useful (like moderation bots, or the bot in /r/Android that links apps, that kind of stuff).
I think they should, with limitations; namely, I think that all bots should need to use a special bot account, which disallows access to voting, and I think they should be required to do something genuinely useful. For example, AutoModerator (hehe, I bet it's Tilde approved :P ) and the Remindme! bot, I think almost everyone agrees those are useful. But for example the mispellings or mobile wikipedia bot just add more noise then the value they contribute. I think each one should be required to be approved by a mod before it can post in general tildes, maybe restrict them just to ~test at first. Or perhaps allow them to do only PM's unrestricted, since that doesn't clutter the conversations. Still clearly labeled and without voting powers though.
Edit: well apparently remindmebot is more controversial then I thought, I've always gotten good use out of it especially since it mostly operates my PMs now. But I think my point still stands
I think the Remindme! bot is actually a good example of a bot that generates unnecessary noise, but otherwise I agree with your point.
I'd say a better example would be the auto summary bot - it serves a useful purpose for people who want to skim the key points from an article, but don't have the time to read the entire thing. It can occasionally be noisy, however more often than not it serves a useful purpose.
I do like the idea of initially restricting bots to a test environment, this allows for plenty of experimentation by the developer without causing noise across the rest of the site.
Just as some people hate the CommonMisspellingBot, I hate the summary bot, because it lets people be too lazy. It lets people who have not bothered to read the article comment, and since they're not informed, it generates lots of noise in the comments.
I strongly disagree. If someone doesn't want to read the article, they won't. Would you rather them start commenting based on info they gathered from the title, or have a decent amount of knowledge from a generally well-written summary?
If they won't take the time to read the article, what makes you think that they'll read and comprehend any summaries before commenting?
Because summaries take like a minute to read, that's the point of a summary... I rarely read full articles because I don't personally find it a good use of my time (I find a lot of stories to be awfully padded out to seem long), but I read summarybot every time I see it since it's generally 3 short paragraphs. I realize this is anecdotal, but I hope it at least demonstrates the thought process of someone who only reads the summary, not the article.
Let's say 50% of commenters on a post read the article, and 50% don't.
With the summary bot you might get 40% reading the article, 20% reading the summary, and 40% just reading the title.
The end result is that 10pp more people have some understanding of the article past just the title, which IMO outweighs the 10pp less people who read the article. Especially since the summaries do a pretty good job... summarizing the articles.
Obviously whether it's useful or not depends on the ratio of people switching from article to summary vs title to summary. But my guess is people reading the article is already low, and that most of them will keep reading the article.
The concept of RemindMeBot is good, but it should be done on the system level and not with a bot / trigger in a comment.
Overall, I think bots can serve a purpose to demonstrate potentially useful features, but for tildes, I think the bots should have a certain spam (or whatever) threshold before the accounts are disabled. This would weed out the useless bots (e.g. MetricBot, spelling corrections, single image galleries, etc.)
This is where the suggestion of shadow comments or whatever would come in handy. Someone was talking about being able to leave comments only the person they were replied to could see or something in a different thread on here somewhere. Remindme could use shadow comments to reply and stuff.
Maybe if bots were auto-minimized unless you opt-in (and can opt-in to specifically labeled bots?)
Edit: ooo and somehow any '!callBot' type comments could be auto-min also. Those are as distracting as bots themselves sometimes. Might be tough to implement tho. Might require heuristics and labels.
remind me bot is awful.
The only issue with this is that it'd probably quite a bit more work to develop for both Tildes and the bot developer.
That's exactly how it works though, isn't it? In a lot of places remindmebot doesn't make public posts, but if you summon it with RemindMe! it will PM you to confirm and then PM you again when it reminds you.
I think step 3 is critical @Fereau's point.
I like the idea of bots not being able to vote. Now that I think about it I’m not sure why I haven’t thought about it before.
I quite like Wikipedia bot when I'm on mobile
maybe bots may only speak when called upon by a user? Like discord bots where you say like !remind_me and !source
I hope we wont have bots. I'm so tired of seeing RemindMe! and "good bot".
SO much noise
I got so used to it that I forgot there could even be a reality without it. This site is like music to my eyes.
It might make sense for bots not to act like ordinary users, making posts and leaving comments. They should operate more as services.
A misspelling bot that comments to complain that you have misspelled something is annoying, but a misspelling bot that fixes your post for you, or proposes an edit that you can accept, or that operates as a filter that viewers can turn on and off, would be genuinely useful.
The sort of things that bots can usefully do to comments don't necessarily lend themselves to being presented as comments; the tag system, or some kind of filter mechanic, would be a better interface.
Maybe comments should be only for humans, unless the bot is actually attempting to carry on a conversation.
I'm starting to think that this is the way to go, though it will probably be a lot more difficult to build. Maybe a bit idealistic?
It would definitely be harder than just throwing bots in as users. It would require more integration into the site, and maybe some trust in the bots; some of the stuff you would want bots to do would be pretty powerful to let just anybody come along and start doing. But I think it would also be more useful.
Part of the benefit of this site is that if something that a bot provides is useful for a community, they're open to making that functionality part of the site itself, possibly restricted to a specific group.
Still, I like the "bot account" idea too.
Exactly. Reddit has plenty of nifty bots that fill the lacking site-wide functionality. If a bot is so useful it warrants permission to be here, then there should be serious discussion about natively integrating it for all users to easily take advantage of.
We’re fortunate for three reasons right now that contrast with reddit’s trajectory:
We have a creator in @Deimos who is much more open to integrating feature ideas than the reddit admins.
The site is at a stage of the development life cycle where constructive feedback with consensus is highly valuable and almost always translates into a feature update.
We have the benefit of learning from all of reddit’s mistakes, having seen how they play out to the extreme.
If someone proposes a clever bot idea, I think this is the first question: is there any reason the bot’s functionality shouldn’t be formally integrated into the site? If yes, what are those reasons, and how does the bot best serve its purpose to users by being 3rd party?
That could be a good idea for something like the bots that fix the mobile links of sites for desktop users. Most websites will automatically redirect mobile users to the mobile site, but they don't do the same for desktop users for some reason.
So sort of like slack where you install the bot on your instance rather than on the whole site?
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Interesting point to consider.
Maybe we want a way to "surface" available bots that doesn't encourage them to put their own explanatory signatures in their messages. Self-advertising bot comments can out-reproduce the comments of actually useful bots.
Agreed. Bots should only be summoned when needed
Well, there are two major types of bots on reddit. Novelty and utility bots. I'll just quickly state that I'm not personally a fan of novelty bots and tend to ignore them on sight.
I'd like to talk more about the utility bots of reddit and specifically use one of the most widely used ones, AutoModerator as an example of a utility bot. Almost always AM is used by the moderators of a subreddit to disseminate information, notify people of subreddit rules and to automate some tasks. It does serve other purposes, but in the interest of keeping this brief I'll move on to the next point.
If bots aren't welcome on tildes, then first of all consider the value of consistency. Disallow everything, or risk having to play adjudicator whenever someone either disagrees with the function or questions the legitimacy of a given bot. As the site grows, this task grows increasingly time consuming and equally menial.
Secondly: If tildes disallows bots a need for additional features implemented directly into the site arises. As the user loses functionality the weight is on tildes' shoulders to fill that niche.
Discords approach to bots is excellent. Have the bots require signup, get labelled as bots properly, can be moderated internally effectively based on how they're operating, etc etc.
Will make abusive bots far far easier to handle purely because they will stand out by not having followed the proper signup process. Easy to instantly remove them instead of speaking to the bot owner and being forced to assume the bot owner is acting in good-faith but ignorant.
The only thing I that would get me to approve of bots is the ability to completely ignore them. And by completely, there is no
[ignored user click here to reveal], and any replies to it are also not present. There are simply some bots I find completely irrelevant (e.g., Single image in an imgur gallery bot, good bot, bad bot, etc.) Also I feel like there be a limit to the amount of links and text they can post, as on mobile apps like Reddit Sync where they preview the link domain it becomes a huge mess. Meta links to the author/website/github should be on the bots profile page.That would have to also include the inability to call a bot as there is no way to hide those comments.
Maybe the only, sanctioned, way to interact with bots is through PMs? And then have some sort of discoverability option for people that want to seek out bots.
Or to call a bot you must start your reply to a comment with a @botname it would not be displayed to a person that has that bot ignored
Maybe the way to go about this would be to have localized bots? Users install bots for themselves, and when they communicate with them no one else sees.
I could get behind that idea as well.
I think bots are largely unnecessary. If a bot offers a truly useful function, shouldn't that be a site feature? Why not spend time writing a pull request instead of a potentially annoying bot?
I'll take a guess and say because a PR has to be approved. A bot just needs an account, and won't be banned unless it's troublesome.
I was thinking of perhaps an opt-in bot system. Each bot has to register as a bot, and cannot vote on anything, only comment. For anyone to see a bot's comment they have to enable it for thier account (perhaps mods can enable them by default for specific ~'s). Perhaps even restrict it so that nobody can reply directly to a bots comment (this is where I see a lot of the clutter).
I would love to see an API further 'down the road'. I have to politely disagree with the notion that bots are bad or unnecessary though. They can be put to some creative uses that may improve content or drive traffic to the site. Maybe there could be an approval process to weed out any 'bad' bots / devs.
Bots are a blight on Reddit - oops! - on Tildes.
They only add clutter. They derail discussions without contributing anything of value.
I think people have outlined the basics: useful bots are great, general shitbots are not.
There's no reason to have a bot that responds with a nonsensical comment to random triggers - it's basically spam at that point. If I can't get something useful out of a bot like information on a cross linked post or a tl;dr of a wiki article, I'm not interested.
Special bot accounts would be a great idea, and maybe some kind of limiter on commenting to keep them from running amok. I'd also straight up ban bots that do nothing bu respond to a key phrase with useless comments.
I think bots need more restrictions to prevent spammy bots cluttering the entire site, perhaps bots needing pre approval before posting in a particular group and not being able to just parse and post sitewide. I want more bots that fulfill niches in certain groups for example the bots that pull card data for subreddits like r/mtg - those bots are valuable and provide something useful for the community. Bots that spam imperial to metric conversion? Not so much so.
As reading I thought what if to reduce spam bots can only interact when called upon by a user and can be filtered out via tags
I've always hated Roboragi because it's not that hard to google things. It was only put in place for lazy people.
In most subreddits I ended up having to mute Automod because the subreddit as a whole would always pin him with a top comment to every thread.
I don't really like bots.
The reminder bot on Reddit is awesome. The bots that don't serve any purpose suck. The 'good bot' bot or any that correct grammar are just annoying.
I'm all for bots but only if they're practical and not annoying, like the reminder bot.
Bots may be useful, but they don't really belong derailing discussion threads.
I mean, there are going to be bots. You can't really stop it. Even if you don't supply an API, then someone is going to use headless Chromium to simulate users. Then it'll devolve into an endless game of whack-a-mole and witch hunts.
I'd much rather provide an easy way to make bots and apply a tag to all content generated via API that can be filtered. That'll cut through much of the noise and let users choose whether or not they want to see bots. It'll also (IMO) fit into the mechanics of tags and filtering.
And another point... having other users determine what is a "bot" (via tags or other means) could lead to an actual user being unfairly labeled and then mistreated. It could lead to some sort of "spam-banning" (for lack of a better word).
There are a few specific bots that are useful and don't create unnecessary noise. The best example from reddit is roboragi on the various anime subreddits. It's a bot that allows users to automatically link to the information page of an anime or manga. It's very useful for sourcing shows that get mentioned and only posts when it is specifically called. Other than roboragi, I can't think of any bots that have ever contributed much to reddit discussion. Maybe the fact that roboragi needs to be tagged is the difference maker.
Just wanna point out that bots are not necessarily just noise, some are actually useful. Pretty much every subreddit has a moderation bot, many subreddits have sub-specific bots like /r/Android that has a bot who links apps in the Play Store and the Magic The Gathering card bot.
I like @User 's suggestion to have a "hide bots" setting. As long as we can identify them as bots, that should be fairly easy to implement. Maybe bot accounts need to be created differently than regular accounts? Or making it a rule to tag your bots and banning untagged bots?
I feel like bots such as decronym or what ever it is is a great utility bot and should be considered when building an API. Somethings you just can’t google because they are so specific