Hi all,
What’s your opinion on the repost bot in the AITA community? From my perspective, it provides little to no value to cross post such content from another website.
First of all, AITA lives off the comments and if there aren’t any, it’s not really entertaining to read the posts.
Second, if someone hypothetically replied here, it would never reach the OP on reddit, so it’s not meaningful to make the effort.
And last but not least, if there are sometimes dozens of reposts per hour here, it drowns any interesting original content on Lemmy.
So overall I guess it brings more harm than good.
PS: Originally I planned to post this in the AITA community directly but ironically it’s locked down to “mods only”. So there’s not even a chance to have there any original content.
Regards, rbn
Disagree.
How own post doesn’t say it’s for personal use.
It’s on every instance because everything is federated by default and everyone cries about censorship any time anything gets defederated even if it’s 100% intentional no-value spam, as is the case here.
It’s detrimental to lemmy for 2 reasons. Firstly it just clutters up the place, lots of posts with no interaction. Secondly it implies that being more reddit-like is the objective, which is simply not true.
You only federate (content/communites) with stuff that’s been subscribed to by your users or vice versa. Please don’t type out whole paragraphs of bullshit.
Also if you want to read some stuff from the guy that created it instead of also saying random stuff about them:
spoiler
Q: This is spam, can you stop?
A: First of all, I apologise for the inconvenience. All you have to do is block @bot@lemmit.online, and none of its posts will ever show up on your instance. If you you don’t want anyone else on your server to be exposed to this bot/instance, you should convince your admin to defederate from lemmit.online. Since there are no other users on here, there will be no harm done.
Obviously I could stop, because running this server and software is only ever going to cost me time and money. But for the reasons listed above, I still think this server is a useful addition to the lemmyverse at this time. But I’m looking forward to the day where I can turn the bot off because it’s no longer needed.
Q: What started this?
A: Okay, nobody asked this, but I’m going to tell you anyway. After Reddit made it clear that they are effectively killing third-party apps and implementing plenty of other anti-end user decisions, I realized that I would either have to accept not being able to access my time-wasting content or have to do so in a rather uncomfortable way (either through the official app or old.reddit.com for as long as they’ll allow it to exist).
Being a stubborn developer, naturally, I chose option C: Have my own Reddit. With blackjack, and hookers. This way, I would still be able to access my beloved content without being beholden to Reddit’s mood swings and abusive relationship tendencies.
Besides that, I also know that Content is King. So I’m order to counter the network effect (No users because no content, No content because no users), I figured it would be better to have some inorganic content to bootstrap the adoption of Lemmy.
So at some point in July some newcomer from reddit thought it might be a good idea to subscribe to lemmit.online, and then they returned to reddit, and we’re stuck with this garbage in perpetuity?
I did read the authors FAQ. It’s nonsensical.
That doesn’t help new users. As I mentioned in my comment. This spam discourages engagement from new users and gives the impression that lemmy is some kind of shitty version of reddit. I guarantee there are many new users who don’t understand why there are dozens of AITA posts from reddit with no comments.
As I said in my comment, no one want’s to defederate because someone will complain that it’s censorship, which it is not in this case.
This is lunacy. He could have his own reddit without subjecting the rest of Lemmy to this spam. I sincerely doubt the guy is even using these posts himself - what’s the point of reading AITA questions without the comments?!
It’s the opposite, these posts are making it look like Lemmy has no content.
All your complaints should be taken up with whoever runs discuss.tchncs.de
No, the idiot who runs lemmit.online should realise that their dumb repost bot is not serving any purpose and is harming lemmy, not just discuss.tchncs.de.
Everything is only federated if someone from your instance subscribed to the community. That’s what they mean by “someone found it useful”. Just block it. I blocked it months ago.
We shouldn’t really have to block a bunch of bots to make the platform usable
Just turn off “show bots”. One option.
I don’t want to disable bots, I want spam bots to stop degrading Lemmy
Like I said in another comment, it’s only like five. I’m not trying to excuse their behavior or anything, it’s just that a few blocks easily take care of the problem.
I’ve also blocked the bot, but that doesn’t solve the issue for Lemmy in general.
What issue? People can block it. It’s not an issue.
The issue that I’ve been repeating ad-nauseum.
It’s unappealing to new users, and implies that Lemmy is a shitty version of reddit.
“Lemmy is great, you just have to block all the spam!”
That doesn’t really seem that different than any other site. You generally have to do some tweaking to get things the way you want them. Having “show bot accounts” as an option can cut all of the Reddit repost entirely. Even apart from that I looked at my block list and it looks like I’ve blocked five bots and I don’t see any Reddit repost stuff at all now.
Bear in mind, Reddit itself is victim to reposts from Reddit by bot accounts but those bots are acting as if they were humans. On Lemmy bots can self identify as bots and it seems like most of the Reddit repost bots here are marked as such because they’re not trying to fool people into thinking they’re humans to gain karma to sell an account. Because there is an option to stop showing all bots it means you can block it all super easily.
Yeah no it’s a huge issue that drives off new users and stops Lemmy from growing. The spam bots wouldn’t be so terrible if they didn’t flood the entire feed and stifle actual communities. It needs to fucking go.
Are there any “spam bots” right now not identifying as bots? There is an option to not show anything from any (self identified) bot.
Edit: spam bot in quotes to differ it from things identifying as bots, I didn’t mean it to sound condescending.