The rules for bots # Bots should be clearly prompted by a command # Bots that always post without human intervention are noisy and are often unwanted.
Bots should not act in a community without mods from that community being contacted first # Moderators should not have to chase down the bots being used in their community, it should be opt-in. Just ask, be nice.
Bots should minimize the space they take with their messages # A bot’s response should be a small as possible to avoid taking space that could be used by people.
I’d just suggest that this is a defacto ban based on the current requirements.
If bots are going to be command triggered and require pre-approval by individual community moderators, I think it would be prudent to include bot details in the community info pages.
Currently I can’t think of any reasonable way for a Beehaw user to know which bots are operational and what their commands are.
We could put all of the bot commands on them on the page for bots. That said, I expect many people will see one person doing it and copy that behaviour.
To be honest, I’m OK with that. If I want a bot to summarise an article, I’ll go to ChatGPT or use Bing Chat. I don’t come to BeeHaw to interact with a bot. I’m here to interact with humans and in my opinion it should be a human that decides to post a link to an article and that human should also summarise it. They will do a better job than even the best bot.
While I’m not outright opposed to bots, I have yet to see a bot on Lemmy or Reddit that actually added value to the community. Usually every bot I encounter gets blocked the first time I see it.
Unfortunately a lot of bots on Lemmy that’s not really an option, for example a bot that finds interesting articles and posts them on Lemmy… I don’t want to see those posts, but at the same time I might want to see the discussion around the article. So I can’t block it.