I’ve gotten through (I believe) all the comments in the meta thread. So I want to establish a few things, first being a better definition on spam.

Spam is not “I don’t like this and its a paid product” or “I don’t like this and they used AI/LLMs”.

Spam would generally be considered:

  • Mass-posting - Posting the exact same post across a bunch of of different communities, rapidly.
  • Repetitive Content (aka karma farming) - repeatedly submitting old popular content. I’ll note that this is completely irrelevant on lemmy, this was more of a reddit issue due to karma.
  • Bot Activity / AI Abuse - Using scripts/bots/gen AI to automate posts and comments.
  • Unsolicited DMs - Mass private messages or chats to users, completely unsolicited

I’d say anything other than that deserves a followup rule, and this definition should go in the sidebar.

Regarding the promotional posts themselves, I think something like the 10% rule makes sense - no more than 10% of the account should be self-promotional material or comments within the community.

I do think it makes sense to include an exception for 100% free/libre open source projects. Partially open projects with a closed (paid) component should be subject to the 10% rule. So what I propose as the rule would be:

Promotional posts require community participation or they will be removed. No more than 10% of your posts or comments may be self-promotional, or your post will be removed. F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & without any paywalls, it will be exempt from this rule.

Questions, comments, clarifications, and harsh criticisms are welcomed in the comments. As a reminder from my intro post, and because of some comments in the other thread, I will mention:

There are people on both sides of the keyboards, so please be respectful of others.

  • curbstickle@anarchist.nexusOPMEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Normally I would suggest to just moderate it based off of “you know it when you see it”, but in this case it’s difficult since it’s very similar to legitimate posts.

    Precisely the problem.

    The community has been really good about down voting the more troublesome ones, but a clean solution to this really isn’t easy.

    I’m hoping this can be where disclosures/tagging can really help, but this has a lot of roots in how the prior mod was handling things. Anything they didn’t like was a rule 3 removal, so appropriate rules I don’t think were made, and as a popular community… Yeah.

    I’m doing what I can starting with the most problematic that I can see (first the removals that didnt quite fit, now the promos in general, next ai/ai disclosures, and then we’ll have to see.

    Part of it too is that the community is not necessarily full of anti-ai folks (though there is one who has been following me around and downvoting), but against irresponsible ai use. I think a few posts have shown that (ai for translation, documentation, a snippet here and there that got reviewed and refined after by a human, etc).

    I’m of the same mind that its some kind of SEO or maybe telemetry they want to sell, but I’m not sure.

    That said, I’m all ears on options / discussions.

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      This sounds good to me, thank you for putting in the time for this!