Taking about settings I can adjust right now, they are

• number of posts
• period over which top posts are being looked
• mimimum upvotes threshold
• subbredits from which posts are gathered
• exclusions of any particular sources

My friend and I also thinking about utilizing ChatGPT to create a summary of the article as well as to add some intellegent filtering but this is a long term (may be never) type of a pet projects

Let me know if you find something to be particular interesting or have other ideas

Well, that was an attempt… Thank you for monitoring the community and reaching out. I’m switching the bot off.

If you find it suitable, there is also an option to decrease the number of posts so it’s less spammy

I agree that “Not everything that makes it to the top of a subreddit is quality content.”. However, I pull only the news from predefined set of news sources (I filter by url link). So it’s about local Vancouver news rather than popular posts by random folks. Try it out on my Telegram channel above to get the feeling what it’s like.

As for the second point, I’m I a programmer. Content generation / moderation isn’t my cup of tea. I’m lazy and hate manual tasks (you see I’m a good engineer:)). I wanted to invent/implement a smart solution to improve Vancouver community here. I’m a fun of r/vancouver, but I do realize that decentralization is the move to the right direction

A steady stream of real Vancouver news which are popular on Reddit will attract me personally to this community more and I was thinking maybe somebody else as well?

Not advertising here, but with this low traffic you could be in a permanent free tier with AWS with all the availability guarantees. It doesn’t work with EC2, but for serverless solutions (ApiGateway, Lambda, DynamoDB) they have something like “we start charging after 1M calls per month” (don’t quote me on this exact number). I have a couple of pet projects working this way