I am not naive enough to think that people won't try to automate things to make money / exert influence but; as just a normal middle aged women who recently came here from Facebook, it seems pretty anti-social for a social network. Just saying...
I am not naive enough to think that people won't try to automate things to make money / exert influence but; as just a normal middle aged women who recently came here from Facebook, it seems pretty anti-social for a social network. Just saying...
@punkgal69 you and @casandrarose should talk soon. You've both said the same things lately.
It's just a matter of incentives and reasons for being here.
In your opening post about 2 days ago you had 23 upvotes and several people greeting you. (I just upvoted and said hello BTW)
You responded to 3 of them, two of whom were both bots (btw you missed a few real people trying to chat you up).
This is the crux of the problem. Ostensibly there are real financial incentives for welcoming new people.
The reality is you need to pick the right person to welcome if you want that financial incentive and thus people have built bots to do the welcoming. They are able to do this because someone posted a tutorial a couple of months back that showed how to build a bot that does this. Problem is the tutorial was woefully incomplete and didn't provide any method of controlling the bots properly. Thus the bots "look" anti-social when you see a swarm of them and this is a reflection on the bots, their owners and the community.
The net result is what you saw. If you think of a bot as someone's pet, then there are many in the community including myself who view these bots as "offleash" and harassing visitors.
Dan and I both agree completely about this.
There are solutions to this, but it's not an anti-social thing it's just about putting incentives in the right places so the bots that are being made anyways are being put to good and productive use.