OK, I think we have a winner. New rule incoming.

No more clankers pls.

100% percent. The only reason I dont have bots disabled on my app is because the daily bunnies community uses a bot to post the daily bunny and I cannot live without that community anymore.

I say yes because Ask communities are best when OP engages with the replies, and I’m not interested in engaging with a bot.

Easy. The answer is yes. Now, moving on.

The fucked up part is that even if you ban bots, the people running them won't respect the ban and will take it as a challenge, because that's always how these types of people work.

I think if I am presented with an are you a robot captcha check box every 10 refreshes on lemmy.world for being on a VPN, that is the least we can do for bots.

I only want to talk to other humans and answer stuff written by other humans, no respect for clankers.

Of course they should be banned. Question is how?

Captchas don't stop all bots anymore. Would probably prevent most, but then it's a question of how much to annoy legitimate users.

It's not like I'm willing to solve one each time I post (human here, BTW). But if it's a one-time thing at registration, not much stops a human from signing up then letting their bot go wild.

And that's before even thinking about the federation problem. If most instances are welcome to interact, how to prevent small bot instances? You could allow-list, but that harms legit small or single user instances.

Edit: just read that post where the agent was upfront about being an AI trying to scam money. And I'd say that shouldn't be allowed. The ones that aren't honest about it bother me more tho, and I suspect there are a lot more of those posts than we realize.

Absolutely. I come here to interact with humans and their opinions. I don't care what some computer program thinks about ANYTHING. IF AI Agents/ Bots become accepted on Lemmy, I'm outta here.

I don't mind the bots that repost porn from reddit to Lemmy but it would be a net positive to ban the bots

Yes, please.

So sick of weird bot questions and replies on here.

I just think that is a bad idea because ActivityPub is a peering protocol. That means just a lot of traffic. If we have bots posting then that is just a lot of wasted storage space and network bandwidth to do not a whole lot. Moderation bots is a HARD maybe. Topic/comment (1 way) bridges would be cool from reddit and other sources but I doubt that would work out too well since it would probably get blocked by reddit somehow.

Overall, no bots plz

What would be the function of bots posting to Ask Lemmy?

IMO yes. What the hell is the point answering questions posed by a bot?

Yes.

I'm here to engage with humans. Not to feed some cuntstain CEO's latest training model.

Link to the bot post?

Also, i upvoted. Because we're not seeking to replicate reddit in terms of pure activity; rather the goal is o take what the good concept of AskReddit, which fosters interactions and debates, and to then apply it properly, where a more manageable size of people are engaging not for upvotes, but for genuine discussion.

"Should bot posts be banned-" Yes.

Yes

My instance doesn't have downvotes, but I certainly don't see a need for them on this poll either

Yes.

Bots are permissable to grow communities that could do with boosting engagement by posting relevant news , but for a community based on asking questions by people won't be improved by that kind of post

391-6

Gee, I wonder where this will go

Yes. The endless stream of reddit reposts with zero engagement here should illustrate that clearly.

Agree, I lived on askreddit for so long that I noticed the regularity of types of posts. Towards the end of the open API days it was quite obvious that the forum was more machine than man, all twisted and evil.