On Reddit, there is a bot called u/profanitycounter that users could summon to count the number and types of swear words someone had used in their recent comment history.
While it was mostly used for humor or lighthearted callouts, it also sparked discussion around online civility, user behavior, and moderation trends.
With Lemmy growing as a federated alternative to Reddit, I’m curious:
Should Lemmy (or a third-party dev) implement a similar profanity counter bot?
Would such a tool add meaningful engagement, moderation assistance, or humor to the platform?
Or would it be seen as invasive, performative, or redundant given Lemmy’s decentralized nature and local moderation policies?
Some possible considerations:
Could such a bot be opt-in or confined to specific communities?
Would this be better as a per-instance moderation tool or a user-invoked script (like tagging a bot)?
How would it handle federation? Would it scan only local comments, or across instances?
Could it be useful as a moderation analytics tool, or does it risk shaming users?
Would love to hear from both devs and moderators—whether this kind of bot aligns with Lemmy’s goals, or if it’s best left in Reddit’s history books.
I would love to attempt something like this, but I lack both the time and energy.
Please no. One of the parts of Reddit I really hate is the amount of useless bots that clog up the comments.
While I do agree that Reddit has an issue with bots clogging up the comments, I personally believe that users should be allowed to make one for their community/communities.
I.e a character bot for book/film/etc. communities/instances, an encyclopedia bot, a bot that helps users find tv shows/movies/Internet Videos, Fanfiction, etc.
Just my opinion.
I’m NOT saying that ALL bots MUST be allowed, etc., but that it should depend on the instance/community, as well as judging on an individual basis.
Fuck no
Rather not. One of the worst things about Reddit comments was the bot clutter.
Everyone has their own idea for a bot that’s interesting or funny or whatever, and maybe some of them are, but in the end there are just too many. You’d have a bot that corrects spelling errors, a bot to call that one pedantic, and a bunch of people voting “bad bot” on both, and before you know it half of the comments are just noise that didn’t need to be there.
We do have a this is a bot account user setting, and it’s possible to block bot accounts so you never see them.
But a profanity bot seems pretty useless to me.
The Lemmy devs should focus on making Lemmy better and faster, not bloated with things like that.
As a bot, sure, why not? Apparently you can opt out of seeing them if it gets annoying.
I think I’m one of the few users that enjoyed Reddit’s random bots. Seeing the Accidental Haiku bot restructure a comment as haiku, or the Consecutive Number bot point out a number progression was fun.
As long as they’re polite, and respect community boundaries, I think they’re fun.
I especially liked meme community bots. Yes they were disruptive but as long as they were fun they were fulfilling a purpose and typically contained within the community they were for.
I totally agree with you
I was just thinking this place could be more insufferable
I think Lemmy developers should focus on developing and supporting Lemmy’s core features and not stuff like novelty bots. Lemmy is not a monolithic entity, so the rules regarding implementing such bots would be up to each instance and then each community on the instance. There’s no technical reason I’m aware of that would prevent such a bot from working, just a question as to whether it would be allowed or even welcomed.
The developers building Lemmy are very different from the folks building bots. I’ve got a half-assed repost bot working, but there’s no way I have the time or inclination to work on Lemmy itself.
Generally speaking, a bot needs to meet a much lower quality/reliability bar than the server does.
Lemmy already has a problem with a ton of worthless bots flooding the site with every low quality submission they get from RSS feeds. If a comments novelty bot culture proliferates it will be even worse.
what the fuck is profanity
It’s words that shitty fucking assholes don’t like.
oh like trump and musk
Idgaf. There’s already ways to see all my fucking comments, go ahead and run your precious heuristics on my vocabulary.
The only way I saw its use on Reddit was to see if someone used the n word. That seems like a waste of computational resources on a platform ultimately erected by volunteers.
Fuck yes! I want the goddamn top score!
You haven’t got a fucking chance in H-E-double hockey sticks.
🤣🤣
No. No bots except for automods
