I see more and more posts that are just a link to a video, post, or article. There’s no text in the description.
I’d like to see some of the article quoted and/or a brief reason this is currently being posted to Lemmy.
When it’s just a link, the cynical part of me thinks it’s just an SEO bot—especially if the account never posts any comments.
What are some ways to encourage posts that are more engaging?
Or should I just ignore, downvote, and/or block those doing this kind of posting?
How often do you want me to type “I thought this was interesting.”
How often do you want me to type “I thought this was interesting.”
Then don’t type it.
But do type what comes after the “because”!
( “I thought this was interesting BECAUSE" ) this guy is just so funny
hey, let’s talk about it
look, she did it again! LOL
Be the change you want to see
Require a description.
I always downvote links to videos with no text.
These low effort posts could as well be bot posts.
Posters should think about that: nobody can decide if you are human or bot.
If there are actually bots in the race posting “against you”, that is, posting links to contrary articles, then the bots are going to win, because they are more and can post more.
Humans should make sure to be recognized as humans.
It is not hard (yet):
Simply add one or two lines that tell us why you have posted this article, what you find remarkable, or what is your own comment.
The bots can summarize articles too though.
They are not doing that. But maybe next year or so, yes.
And when they start doing that, then it is the next round in this competition.
Then we humans need to write in such a way as the bots would not do it. This will be easy for the first few years.
They’ve been doing it for years already. There’s bots on Reddit whose purpose is to summarize articles. You can ask off-the-shelf LLMs to have a conversational response to articles today that is indistinguishable from a human response without having a full conversation with the account.
They’ve been doing it for years already
On lemmy? Then show me 3 examples, please. Different subs if possible.
There’s bots on Reddit
I don’t care a fly’s fart.
It’s up to the moderators whether to allow those kinds of posts. Sometimes I’ll look at the linked article and post a summary (often just the first sentence after the headline) but I’d rather that the original poster was required to do that. I started !savedyouaclick@lemmy.world and made a few posts there, but no one else posted anything, there so it’s deserted for now.
Some mods throw a hissy fit if you post more than a link and a headline that matches the story’s exactly. Some people want more than a link and a headline. You can’t win.
We should fire such mods who encourage low effort posts.
I block that kind of posting, a lot of them are bots.
clients like jerboa can block self-announced bots, which takes care of a lot of them, and if you see the same username posting six posts of questionable quality without any context, you can block them too.