Know what I don't miss from reddit? Every other post with "1 comment" but it's just fricking automoderator

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Hey! Look at that, all the words that where used in this comment where words!

beep boop I am a bot, and this action was done automatically. If you want to contact the devs, no.
- u/Thekingoflorda, I have found error in your comment:
  
  words that ~~where~~ [were] used in this comment ~~where~~ [were] words!
  
  You should know where to use 'where' or 'were', if you were not illiterate
  
  This is an automated bot. I do not intend to shame your mistakes. If you think the errors which I found are incorrect, please contact me through DMs!
- Hey!
  
  Look at that, all the words that
  
  where used in this comment where words!
  
  beep boop I am a bot that detects haikus, and this action was done automatically.
- I would say that some bots were useful. Like the one that would convert the units from "freedom" oned to ones that actually make sense (or the other way around).
  
  Also, I like the bot that summarized the article.
- Okay, this one made me literally laugh out loud.
- good bot
- Sweet jeebers, I hope this is comedy. I laughed, but 99+% of the bots roaming Reddit are nothing but a drag, and I hope there's a way to block all bots here.
Listen here you little shit...
Be sure to read our sidebar and check the wiki!
I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I AM TOTALLY A ~~ROBOT~~ HUMAN BEING

I'm potentially in the minority here, but what drove me up the wall were threads on a very interesting original post, whose comments were just endless chains of puns and lazy jokes, rather than any actual discussion.

I wonder how many of those comments were actually bots or nowadays generated by AI!
- A few are, but I think most aren't. It would be easy bot bait, but at the same time, it's also fairly context-sensitive in a way that would let a fair few users pick up on someone being a bot or not.
  
  Although that doesn't mean that you can't have bots that are in on the joke.
People with x in name, how would you do y.

It's always bots with prepared names
Once the masses come, it'll be the same.

What really pisses me off are entire comment threads filled with "happy cake day!". Like that adds anything to the conversation. There's 1/365 chance that any comment is made on their anniversary. It's not that rare when there's hundreds of millions of people posting (or whatever smaller percentage actually post)

That and the one word reply…

“This”.
It was even worse when they added commenting it as a feature to the official app.
- You're kidding me. They did?
- One step away from just having a one click "post suggested comment" feature that I'm sure is inevitable
I am not going to miss when I make a post that I really need help with and for the only reply to be "happy cakeday"
You don't even need millions!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Does Lemmy show them? If I look on your profile it literally says "Cake Day: (date)"

But I'm not sure if it would flag your account on that day.
- Yes Lemmy also shows cake day on the comments. There will be a lot of those a year from now.
- Lemmy in June 2024 : "happy cake day"
Happy cake day!!!!

That bothered me less than whenever some thread got successful and a mod decided that their input deserved to be viewed as the top comment, so they pinned it to the thread. 95% of the time those comments had nothing to do with reddit moderation, just a normal comment that wouldn't have even been upvoted if it hadn't been made in sudo mode.

Allowing mods to pin comments was a mistake. Was always going to be abused.
- When I moderated I only used pinning for its proper use. This shit was annoying.
Basically the only times I've ever been banned from a sub is by asking "why is this comment pinned" lol
- What was real bad when they'd wait hours and then just say basically the same thing as what was at the top organically.
  
  No new info, just want the easy karma from the top post

We'll almost certainly have the same once someone develops an Automoderator-bot.

Although it might be unavoidable. Some of them were handy for letting the users help keep a sub on-topic, by letting them vote spam posts to be removed before the moderators had time to get around to deal with reports, or saw those posts for themselves.

Others, like Locationbot on /r/legaladvice might be to keep an archive of the post, so that users can read and comment on it, even after the original has been removed, but without them having to go and leave a link elsewhere.

Both of those would be pretty handy for Lemmy as well as Reddit, and I would not be surprised if someone ended up making more of the same, sooner or later.

Something that might be nice, is if Lemmy had a way for users to silently summon bots to a thread, so you didn't have a bunch of threads that were just users summoning DownloaderBot, or setting a reminder for themselves.

We’ll almost certainly have the same once someone develops an Automoderator-bot.

But unlike reddit, lemmy is FOSS and as such people could implement a feature to not count comments made by accounts marked as bots. So only comments (supposedly) made by humans count towards the comment count.
Maybe someone will find a way to mod or extend an instance in some way which removes the necessity to add a comment. Like a "pre comment alert" plugin. If Lemmy had some form of extensions api it would certainly be possible
You can but there are only a handful of bots

To be fair, if fediverse ever takes off, they'll probably need those automods to prevent things from getting out of control.

The potential loss of automods was also one of the things people were worried about with the API changes.

The crux of the problem with Reddit is they drag their feet on these features. Mods have been asking for mod tools for decades. So they had to come up with these half-baked measures.

The beauty of open-source and federation: need a change just make it yourself!

This is pretty much the main reason I am excited for Lemmy and the fediverse. No monetization interests and gatekeeping to get in the way of building the software the way the community needs it. This is why it's so important that the user be the customer.

I am also glad to no longer see those stupid reply memes that everyone felt compelled to use. "This" or "This is the way". It gave me second-hand embarrassment. It seemed like no one could think to reply for themselves anymore.

Came here to comment this
- Beep-boop-beep, tHaTs WhAt ThE uP aRrOw iS fOr
This ^
Im afraid that one's still here
following
I've already seen "this is this way" and now I want a fediverse free of reddit culture.
This
This
This is the way!

On a more serious note, this is absolutely innevitable that these comments will come here as they were made by the same community. I for one never minded them, when used properly they could bu funny sometimes.

In fact, I liked that hot mess of Reddit where serious stuff would be constantly intertwined with humor.

We need an instance where every community is full of self-perpetuated botspam. Then every other instance can defederate from it.

This is the one time i support defederation
Hmm, it might ne fun to get all AI and chatbot creators together and build an instance. Be really good for tweaking interactions.
- If you do can you tell me
That kinda exists. It is called r/subredditsimulator

Semi-related, Wikipedia discussion pages used to be left blank, with a red link, unless there was actually discussion there. Now every article has a boilerplate article quality scale rating template, a notice about when to use or not use the discussion page, etc. pasted onto the talk page as soon as it's created. I miss seeing a rare blue talk page link and going "I wonder what weird stuff people are saying in the talk page for Alex Kidd in Shinobi World."

The Haiku bot was surprising. Unless I was imagining things.

The haiku bot was,
surprising unless I was,
imagining things
- Good bot.
- Beep boop I'm a bot

I didn't necessarily mind the automod comments, but I did hate the fact that there was no way to disable them for subscribers of a sub. It got very obnoxious very quickly.

"This ^"

I'm using Lemmy on desktop. The option of Apollo on desktop would have been game changing for me. The advertisements were messing with my mind!

For desktop Reddit, RES plugin is pretty much required. The native site is too noisy.
You can use Apollo on desktop if you have an Apple Silicon Mac.

True true :)

This is the way

GROND

Yes! Also, I never ever read these comments. I treated them almost like sponsored Google results.

That is not to say that this will not happen in the future.

I hope that there's lack of a need for auto-mod at Lemmy in the future, as I expect each individual community to be smaller.

Every time I would post something on Reddit and get all excited like someone has replied! Someone out there liked this! ... Nope. Automoderator just replying with the rules again.

I ended up unsubscribing from one of the Mod Support subs because every single thread was like this. There were at least four or five automod comments on every post. It was so fucking obnoxious.

r/NeutralNews and r/NeutralPolitics were both bad for that. They had two auto-posts and, since I am slow, I clicked on them every time to the comments just to see the boilerplate auto-posts.

Definitely! It was so annoying

Theae comments are triggering me so hard. Lol

Bots are spam. Yes, even the "useful" ones.

I found a few ones useful but I can see your point. The cool part about Lemmy is that you can filter out bots

Beep. Boop. Meow.

There's pretty much nothing stopping anyone from doing that here, though.

While true, we already have tools to work around it here. Accounts can be flagged as bots, and you can auto-hide posts from bot accounts.

I'm assuming an auto-mod would bypass that by design, but it'll work against the flood of student projects that Reddit threads were full of.