The tl;dr bot that pops up on every link to an article on Lemmy is depriving those websites of clicks, which deprives them of ad revenue.

The only thing that will accomplish is forcing those websites to do the very thing that we rail about; replacing their writers with crappy A.I because they can’t afford to pay for actual content.

We rail against the enshitification of the internet, but when there’s a legitimate way to fight back by giving these websites a page view/read/click etc… so that they can attract advertisers, we would rather have a bot summarize it for us, giving them nothing.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
    55·
    9 months ago

    The tl;dr bot that pops up on every link to an article on Lemmy is depriving those websites of clicks, which deprives them of ad revenue.

    For me its the opposite. Without the summary bot I wouldn’t even bother going to the site to read the whole article. Clickbait headlines are so ubiquitous I’m not going to go to sites without at least a decent change the content advertised is as described. The bot does that, and I click through to the site to read the whole article as the author intended it to be consumed.

    Some bot summaries are blocked by a front end CDN. Usually skip those lemmy posts entirely.

    • KombatWombat@lemmy.world
      3·
      9 months ago

      Yeah it’s the same for me. Most of the time I don’t open links to third parties, and when I do it’s often to skim the introduction to see if the information is worth the read. But TLDRs are like trailers; they let me know what’s going on and can sell me on the full thing if it’s interesting.

    • state_electrician
      2·
      9 months ago

      I don’t like the tldr bot because the summaries are awful. Too much context is removed, quotes are partially copied… It’s doing a bad job.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

        I agree it does a bad job of providing a whole summation of the article, and the key context is removed on occasion. This is why I never depend on just the bot summary. It tells me enough that I should investigate further or skip the article.

        Oddly, in this case this makes the bot better for the point that @Adderbox76@lemmy.ca is making. If the summary to TOO good, there wouldn’t be a need to click through to the article. However the bot is just good enough that you can tell there is real thought the author of the article put in, and some of the jarring cuts the bot makes me interested to click through to see what the article author is actually saying.