By system accounts and bots?
The bots are intelligently picking out stories that local human beings have chosen to share.
Trust me, Iâm not clever enough to deploy a fancy algorithm that can actually âsystem generateâ local news! 
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Regardless of the intent, my point Chris is the predominance of bots and system accounts creating content can be off putting. It clearly was for the OP, it has begun to bug me and I know past members have also found it a bug bear.
That Facebook groups do this is rather moot, particularly as this site seeks to be âbetterâ than those.
Anyways⌠feedback fed back. Your welcome.
I rarely click on a link unless thereâs a covering post, preferably from someone whose name I recognise, explaining why I might find it interesting. Conversely, I rarely include a link in my own posts. I think peopleâs personal news and opinions are generally more interesting than dreary acres of second-hand stuff.
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Personally I like the fact that we can see content and news from alternate sites, it means coming here you get a good overview of local news.
It does feel odd to respond to some of them, which is why I suspect sometimes there is less discussion after these posts, but that does not mean they are not useful.
I think as always finding the balance is key between overloading the site with threads generated from bots to not having those threads and people like myself not really on twitter and some other groups who can be informed of local news they might otherwise miss.
For me, as long as the news is local Iâm happy to see it, and if I donât want to see it \ read it itâs easy enough to scroll past it.
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To be honest, I think you should check your definition of sock-puppet @starman.
It is true that there are a number of new topics created under system accounts, but these are backed by real people and are in fact the outcome of the curation system where me @ForestHull, and @anon5422159 review various news sources and then pick, format and summarise them before posting for the benefit of the forum. Similarly content is sometimes cross-posted from sibling forums where it maybe relevant e.g. Aldi Generators.
The curation system was announced some time ago, and I think works well to bring relevant and useful content into one place on the forum:
Perhaps we donât always get it right, but as far as Iâm aware, no one is paying to read this forum and we made no guarantees on quality or completeness of content. Constructive feedback is however welcome.
I see it like news reporters. If only local news reporters could report on local news, we would all be poorer, wouldnât we? And besides, how do you know what proportion of those topics were curated by âoutsidersâ and not me (I currently live in se23, not that I think that is really relevant).
Well, as the FAQ says, if you see a problem, do please flag it. Thatâs a really good feedback mechanism for letting moderators know what the community feels should be looked at.
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Itâs true to say that there is some manual intervention in what the system accounts do, though, isnât it?
Really it is quite manual in fact.
Basically the system collects various new feeds and presents them in a very raw form in a list to be âapprovedâ or ârejectedâ. Depending on the source, these items are attributed to different system accounts.
Quite a lot of stuff that comes through is duplication - the same things being rehashed by various news outlets and such, and so we check and drop those. Other things are irrelevant and so are similarly rejected (did you know there is a Forest Hill in Victoria, Australia and also Forest Hills in Queens USA?)
Finally the things that are worthy of posting usually require a neat link, quotation and possibly an introduction paragraph to make it useful to the forum, as well as categorisation and tags.
Personally I always aim to try and quote in context and without bias, and to faithfully link back to the original source. I will not reproduce an article wholesale, as I believe the original news site and journalists deserve the recognition (and ad revenue).
Apologies if this lifts the lid on a mechanical Turk of sorts, but I think this benefits the forum and community as a whole, and is as the Internet and hyper-link was intended.
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I so donât care about the techie side of how the links get here. Iâm just glad they do. I donât use Twitter or Facebook and had never heard of the local community group with over 3000 members [Sydenham SE26 Community] that was linked to and kicked off the thread on the Aldi Bell Green generators. And I still canât view that organizationâs webpages as itâs a private Facebook group, whereas SE26 and SE23.Life are open to all.
So without the link on here I would never have known about the Aldi generators.
And unlike another forum that I shanât name, the OP on this thread could choose to leave, which is a shame for the rest of us but her choice. The other place is the Hotel California of fora: you can check in but you can never leave.
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