Two file management apps on the Google Play Store have been discovered to be spyware that quietly sends user data to servers in China.
Two file management apps on the Google Play Store have been discovered to be spyware that quietly sends user data to servers in China.
Update: L3s made the decision to mark it as a bot and has taken the time to reach out and sort of explain their thought process and feelings and I really appreciate it. No bad blood or hurt feelings or anything, and I genuinely think that there’s value and good intention in what they’re doing, I just had an issue with this one specific thing and it looks like we got past it. No big deal, we’re all adults, now let’s eat some cheese.
I understand your reasoning and the purpose of this bot and I’m sure a lot of people are happy with it and appreciate it and I’m not against your work on this bot in any way. But the reason why I think it’s important to mark it as a bot, because to not do so is genuinely misleading and forces people like me to bypass the built in “Please don’t show bots” check in favor of blocking a bot account.
It’s a bot; I specifically have a “Show bot accounts” unchecked; I’m still seeing a bot.
It may or may not be against ToS, at the end of the day I don’t really care that much to be honest, but if I put myself on a “Do not call” list and still get calls from spammers, it’s annoying even if it were entirely legal. I’m not saying it’s as bad as that or that you’re spamming for nefarious purposes, but there is a built in feature into the platform that allows people to be transparent and mark accounts as bots and users to choose to opt out of seeing those and that’s a great, fairly unique feature to this platform.
And respectfully, I don’t think it’s up to you to make that distinction for users that choose to opt out of seeing bot accounts. A bot is a bot. If people are OK with seeing your bot or the inevitable remindme or cat facts or whatever, they can enable that in their preferences, it’s up to the user.
I hope you understand, this isn’t an attack against you or your work in any way.
Not to sound rude here, but I feel the same about you asking me to check that box.Again, if the admins request me to check it, I will do it - or if the Code of Conduct changes. Lets see what they say in the post you made on [email protected] and go from there.I was rude and wrong here.
Task failed. These provisions were made with the expectation that individuals such as yourself would act in good faith. It’s alarming to hear that a moderator of any community feels they are above that standard.
I agree, and have realized it’s there for this reason. The bot button is checked on L4s.
In the comment above I was getting frustrated, as I’m doing something to try and help in my spare time and felt the work I’ve put in was being diminished. I let that get the best of me, and I shouldn’t have.
Thank you for understanding, I’m sorry if I came off combative myself. I would like to point out that the service you are providing is certainly useful. Personally, I’m only interested in seeing content that is parsed by a human and posted because of the natural interest around it. Otherwise, things get posted so fast and across enough communities that it drowns out all real and natural discussion in my subscription feed. That doesn’t mean other people won’t see and interact with these posts, and it doesn’t mean they don’t help grow a community. The nature of the fediverse itself seems to be a little messy, and sometimes people see different things even within the same community.
It might be nice for there to be a more fine-toothed control over what type of bot an account is flagged as, and what types of bots an individual user might see. I’ve disallowed viewing bot accounts since day one, mostly to avoid inane joke response bots as they were so prevalent on reddit. That’s going to be a problem long term, because automoderators were a critical aspect of moderating larger communities.
I did the same thing for the same reason, and was my initial reasoning for not marking L4s. When I read “bots” my initial thought was the useless pun bots, or autocorrect bots, etc.
My plan to make mine different was if someone didn’t receive a comment back on a less visible post, to comment back on L3s to keep conversations going, as the communities I’ve focused on are ones I enjoyed on [website we don’t name] and genuinely enjoyed engaging there. I did that semi-successfully, but didn’t consider that the majority of people wouldn’t want to even see a content bot, and that was my mistake.
Pride put to the side, lesson learned and hopefully L4s can continue to help.