╤ Thank you for being kind
["]🍪 and spreading positivity!
/[_]┘ Please take this cookie
] [ as a token of appreciation.
Then I saw a Walter bot on the Fringe (TV show) sub.
It says Walter quotes like:
“I’ve spent my life making things that bring joy and happiness to make the world a better place. Bubble gum, that was one of my first. Flannel pajamas. Ah, rainbows! And my latest project – singing corpses!”
Then I pulled up a list of Reddit bots and saw an xkcd_transcriber. This one links to the xkcd comic strip and describes it.
Out of that list, stabbot is one the more useful and cool ones. There was a bot that lightly berated people for using swear words and while I was pretty indifferent to it, the insane response to it was kinda ammusing in look-at-all-that-crazy sort of way.
Personally, I can’t stand bots. Especially ones like ‘conversion bot’ that pop up constantly in one of the subs I spend some time in since millimeters are always used, so it has to jump in and tell us how many inches it is.
I feel bad for the mods when I do this, but I always report the bot so I can block it. I’m always surprised reddit allows them at all. It seems like it won’t take much for many (or all) subs to have more traffic from bots than users which is going to drive people away. At least they’re not a huge problem right now. The way I interact with reddit, I only see them pop up here and there. Still annoying (to me) but not enough to make me want to leave.
I take advantage of the Wikipedia bot(s). And I like the Twitter bot which can let you see a Tweet without going to Twitter, even letting you easily see the tweets of someone hateful who has blocked you. It was my main way to read Trump tweets, for instance.
There are some annoying bots, but most of them are fine, IMO. Any that get too annoying tend to get banned by the subreddit mods.
@Joey_P: if it’s a sub where such a conversion is unhelpful, I’m surprised the mods haven’t banned conversion bot. Also, the best-behaved bots have a way for you to tell them to not reply to your posts.
I myself like conversion bot when the units are ones that I don’t intuitively understand. And, when posting myself, I generally try to include both imperial and metric units, which I believe keeps the bot at bay.
It’s a 3D printing sub, millimeters are really the only unit ever used.
But, personally, I don’t want to see the bots at all, regardless of if they’re replying to my post or someone elses.
It would be nice if they made them easier to block/ignore so I didn’t have to report them to the mod.
Yeah, that is annoying. I’ve wished for a direct block button before, albeit not usually for bots.
And, yeah, given the context, it might make sense to use the reports or modmail to ask the mods to consider blocking conversion bot from the subreddit.
To be clear, I’m not reporting them to the mods to request the mods do anything about it, it’s just the only way to bring up the option of blocking them, or any other user for that matter, that you’ve never interacted with.
Some of those automods are a bit too trigger happy though. I assume, but don’t know since I don’t admin/mod a sub, that they can be adjusted. Go to r/whatisthisthing, if the OP mentions the word ‘barrel’ or ‘pole’, the bot will jump in to tell you that it’s a 5G antenna.* If the OP uses a phrase that includes a word like bomb or bullet or munition, even if they’re just describing the shape, the bot shows up to tell them they have an UXO and need to contact the police.
I feel like half my Amazon links get deleted because the mod thinks they’re affiliate links.
On r/explainlikeimfive, the autobot will delete/chastise any reply that’s too short. Even if it answers the question. I understand that they don’t want someone to just drop a wiki link, I don’t 100% agree, but I get it. On the other hand, someone could say ‘what’s salt made of?’ and if you answer ‘salt’, your answer will get modded/deleted. So you have to make it really wordy, but then you run afoul of the ‘don’t try to trick the bots’ rule.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that a some of these subs get a lot of traffic and are run by just a few people (and mostly in time zones that the Americas are in) so they need the bots to help out. I’m just saying maybe they could be dialed back a bit.
*Oddly enough, that bot rarely shows up in threads when the OP is actually asking about a 5G antenna. But ask about ‘this thing on a telephone pole’ or a question about a rain barrel and it shows up.
And, unrelated minor rant, I wish the mods would stop closing threads saying nothing more than ‘This is in our FAT, please check it first’. At least tell us what it is, I, and most other’, I suspect, are interested in the answer, but not interested enough to comb through hundreds of posts/pictures hoping to find the one that matches.
That seems like a win. ELI5 is a forum I wish were moderated a little more actively. It has a lot of promise, but a decent amount of noise and wrong and/or incomplete answers.
Not even just the answers. Some of the questions are incomplete (or nonsensical) and people will jump in and answer. For example, if you said ‘how does skin work?’, IMO, the first few responses should be asking the OP for clarification. What about skin? Like, how does it heal from a cut? How does it protect us from bacteria? How does it hold our insides in? But instead you’ll have half a dozen posters writing small novels that are basically the extent of their knowledge of skin.
Of course the OP will come back later and explain that they meant they wanted to know how you can change the skin on a website and it stays that way unless you use a different computer. So, not only are they not asking about human skin, they actually asking about internet browser cookies.
Oh, I completely agree that a lot of the questions are ill-posed. I don’t really mind, though, if someone interprets it however they want and runs with it. I sometimes learn something from those mini-essays, even if they aren’t at all what they OP was looking for. I do mind if those mini-essays are riddled with errors, though, and outside of areas of knowledge, I may not even realize the errors. It’s something I have to keep in mind when reading that subreddit.
