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Some don't like the NewsBot, - and the points are pretty valid. Should we remove it?

It does seem like it was manageable with just one feed, but adding tucson.com to news and politics seems like a mistake in hindsight.

My intent was to make it easier for everyone to find local news in those relevant channels without having to go through the process of searching for and sharing the article themselves.

However, a thread over at beehaw suggested I was really saturating their feeds with tucson news in a way that was unwelcome and inauthentic.

We have grown, and people are beginning to post their own content here, should the bot stay or go?

We can also just cut down the amount of feeds we're subscribed to. I just thought I needed to be more balanced, by offering at least one more source alongside Tucson Sentinel.

That being said, when we were just subscribed to Tucson Sentinel, the rest of the fediverse didn't seem to mind due to the less hectic pace of their posts. So that's an option as well.

Alternatively, and this is the one I'm leaning towards the most.

I'll keep the thisistucson.com feed for the home page, that's been fairly useful and matches the /r/Tucson precedent.

I'll also keep the Tucson Sentinel local politics feed, it's been VERY good at keeping people informed of upcoming civic duties and I think that's a very important thing a bot can do. Help us with the boring crap!

That would return the news feed back to the users entirely and reduce the politics feed by a lot.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

4 comments

stratic

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I use the Local filter and its pretty much just local news, that works for me but if people are making posts locally they are getting crowded out. If there was a way to give precedence to user posts that would be welcome . I could see the amount of automatic content that is ideal could change as the number of users posting and engaging changes.

th3raid0r

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That's the reason for the different communities I suppose. The intent was that if you didn't want to see a constant stream of news, then just unsub from /c/localnews. I guess the main difference is that people use the ALL feed a lot more often, and not the SUBSCRIBED feed as one would think. Because of this, tucson.social would frequently saturate other instances ALL feeds and annoyed a lot of folks.

There is a setting to disable all bot posts, but that's not what folks really want either.

It seems that the broad fediverse consensus seems to be around all bots should be invoked directly by a user or post mention. No bots should post completely automatically save for a few megathread/event sorta things. This would make things like newsbot bad (except for the monthly/weekly events one), and would mean things like a bot that automatically converts community references into links are good.

Here's the thread where a lot of the discussion took place - https://tucson.social/post/67731

elrac

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I honestly don't like the news bot at all. No one posts on its threads and it's impossible to engage with others on Tucson.social through the noise of all its posts. And honestly, thirdly, if you want to grow this instance with real people you have to leave them something to post, and that is going to be mostly interesting news people want to discuss. Maybe if you restricted the bot to one news thread a day where it posts all of the news articles at once. That and the monthly "what's going on in Tucson this month" threads wouldn't fill up the feed as much.

th3raid0r

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I'd have to modify the bot significantly in order to post all the news in a single thread, but that is certainly an idea!

thirdly, if you want to grow this instance with real people you have to leave them something to post

Understood, but there is definitely an issue with the server growing enough to get enough local engagement in the first place. Almost sort of like an invisible wall of engagment that must be passed before more and more people actually contribute.

The thought was that "news" is boring for the most part, why not automate it? Back on /r/Tucson local news was a very small percentage of posts, most people engaged more on the typical "What's the best X restaurant", "Look at this pictures of the Catalinas!", and other local goings on that the bot just won't do. So I was hoping that I could bring the news and that folks could bring the other things - with a net positive as a result.

Obviously things are a bit more nuanced, and the news articles didn't really drive any engagement that wasn't about news.

Oh well! Do let me know if you like or dislike my more recent changes to pare it back a bit.