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Reddit's bot ecosystem - Any good lessons for features on Tildes?
I may be one of the least qualified people here to discuss this topic, but I find two reddit bots pretty useful:
https://www.reddit.com/user/autotldr
https://www.reddit.com/user/alternate-source-bot (this is my recent favorite)
What do you all think features like the two above being integrated into Tildes in some fashion, via bot or otherwise? Are there any other bot behaviors that you like which would have a good impact here, or are bots that produce comments the scourge of Reddit?
Sorry if this has been discussed before, if so let me know and I will delete this topic.
Thanks. From the first link, I meant something along the lines of this comment and the reply.
For example, below the post could be some additional links to functionality that the two bots I mentioned above do. But it would be built in to Tildes and open a new tab to a page that shows you the alternate sources, or autotldr, or maybe even outline.com/topic-url while outline.com still exists.
So below the post title and link, above the hr could be 3 buttons. Other Sources, SMMRY, Outline
Edit: or whatever other buttons for other functionally provided by bots on Reddit.
Edit2: so are there any bots or 3rd party services whose functionality you think could make using Tildes better?
Edit3: hey @Deimos, this would be the perfect spot for an AMP link as well, if one was discovered.
Just to follow up I would like to share the mockups of what I personally found desirable based this conversation.
Clicking each link would open the destination URL in the existing tab, or a new one, based on user settings. AMP and Outline would require no major additional functionality from Tildes and have nothing to do with bots.
While I think 90% of bots are basically spam, there are some I actually really like, one being the sneak-peek bot giving the top 3 posts of a sub, and those bots that provide a mirror for certain content to name a few. As with many things that get discussed here, I think it should actually be left to the individual groups to decide for themselves as opposed to being a sitewide policy. That said, the mods should have to approve a bot to begin with before making it live as opposed to banning it when it gets too noisy
The common mispelling bot is what finally made me anti-bot. Condescending, annoying, spammy, and without any way to tell it to go away. I think if we're going to have bots on Tildes, they should require admin approval, and have their accounts marked clearly as bots. Maybe having user mechanisms for voting to remove annoying bots would be helpful too.
The only way to stop annoying bots is to make annoying bots. It doesn't help, but you feel better.
I'm proud creator of NoMoreMisspellingBot
They could be prevented in the first place, by not providing an API.
They could be banned on sight (which is what I do in every subreddit I moderate).
Deimos said there will be an API, at least to allow third party applications. Some people might like native Tildes apps.
I've read some discussion about allowing bots only under "bot accounts", which couldn't do certain things (like voting) and would be linked to trusted user. It could have some limitation, like bots being open source and approved. This way, only few useful bots will exist.
To prevent api abuse, api could be locked and avaiable only for high trust users.
I know. But you said "The only way to stop annoying bots is to make annoying bots." so I was pointing out other ways to stop annoying bots.
This would require logging in to use the API. If it has no capabilities for voting, this is silly. If it does let a user interact with the site as normal, why limit the use of third party apps to high trust users?
I meant it to limit development usage of API to high trust users.
For example, if you use API, you have to use key - the key will be generated via your profile and it will be available only to high trust users. You cannot call API without the key. This way, API usage could be linked to user profile.
But that doesn't mean that only the developer's account may use API under his key. You can login with any account, which wouldn't limit third party apps.
So you use key only to enable API and then you have to log in with standard account.
I mean, Deimos helped to design some of the most important bot features of Reddit, right? I would assume he'd be a pretty good person to ask, considering.
I've said it before and I'm saying it again: bots are a blight on Reddit. I can think of only two bots that I find useful on Reddit, and they're useful to me only as a moderator. As a general user, there are no bots that have been useful to me in my 7 years there. Quite the contrary: they create clutter and noise and distraction.
With regard to the two bots you've mentioned...
I would argue strongly against a TL;DR bot here on Tildes. This website is advertising itself as a venue for high-quality discussion. What sort of high-quality discussion can come from reading a summary of an article? No. Just no.
I don't see the need for an "alternate source" bot. If you don't like an article posted by someone, you're not going to like it any better on another website.
In general I tend to agree that bots are mostly just spam, and should be avoided.
My feelings on this, thinking specifically from a US politics perspective, are that it can be useful to see different media publications for the same article. This can show the political spin that differently biased sources are giving an article. It helps to get the whole picture, especially when things are so biased lately.
I'm not sure that a bot automatically posting on every news article is a good way to handle this on Tildes, though. The button on the bottom of a post idea @Adams mentioned above seems like a better way, allowing people looking for alternate sources to find them seems like a better implementation.
What would you guys think about a bot (or even a human operated account) that cross-posted the best comments from Reddit on links that have been posted on both sites? I've wondered if that would be a positive way to seed discussion, at least while the site has a smaller population.
Yeah, I was thinking more human curated possibly with bot assistance. You don't always want to cross-post whatever joke generated the most upvotes.
The links / posts would not be sourced. Only comments would be looked at for links that exist in both places. I might try it out manually for a bit to see what it would be like.
Please don't—those people wrote their comments on reddit, not here. Comments on Tildes should generally be written by people that are actually members of the community here. If there's a comment on reddit (or anywhere else) that has some particularly good information/insight it's reasonable to quote it and/or link to it, but it shouldn't be something that you're going out of your way specifically to do.
Gotcha. I thought it was an interesting idea, but it doesn't seem to be a desirable one.
In what way do you define "best" because if it's by karma then we will just get the circle jerk meme part of Reddit
Probably human curation would work better than karma. The bot would just be to assist.
I'm strongly against that. That would only encourage people to go back to reddit to reply to the people who wrote the original comments. There are subreddits with bots that pull posts from other subreddits and they are devoid of human activity.
It's much better for comments on Tildes to come from users of Tildes who can have a conversation about what they said.
I know @Deimos had brought that idea up in the past. But I’m not sure what the reception was to that concept.
I don't think this site is small enough to need this. But maybe, if we did it really carefully, it might work.
Btw if you are not sure about this site activity, @Deimos recently published tables with site activity. They are a bit outdated as few hundred new users are here, but check out (I think, not sure) ~tildes.official
Does the autotldr bot actually work very well? I've always scrolled past it because I assumed its algorithm isn't smart enough to be terribly useful.
Do you happen to know what kind of algorithm SMMRY is based on?
That's actually pretty descriptive and fairly clear except for (3).
I imagine popularity to be probably something like
total nr of occurances in text * word type priority + isTrendingWordWord type would be something like noun (not-name) 5, name 7, preposition 0
But a lot of articles are 3 sentences with a clickbait headline stretched out into 4 paragraphs and filled with ads. Most articles are legitimately not worth reading.
I feel like in that case, they shouldn't be posted then, no?
Having to post (what is essentially) a whitespace article to invoke a discussion doesn't quite feel right.
Why do you think that? If the discussion is good there is no reason to judge the material that invoked it.
For most redditors the comments section and discussion is the main reason they use the website, the original post is just the catalyst for said discussions.
Well, I believe the post itself should be transparent in its aims, so by marking something as a self post indicates that it is clearly opinion, whilst posting articles with (potentially) inflammatory titles certainly skirts that line.
How about a link to “other sources,” or a link to outline.com?
Having given it more thought, bots that add a comment would probably not be ideal. Please see this other comment of mine for what I am thinking now. They would be more like Tildes Extensions than bots.