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Discussing bans in lemmy.world (self.general)

submitted 2 years ago by djtech to c/general

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi, I’m the author of @nitrofuel, a semi-automated tech news bridge to different Lemmy’s communities and instances. This is not a standard bot, beacuse all links have to be review by the mantainer (at the moment, me) before the bot can post it on all communities (about 14 are registred in the main dataset); i know this is kinda spammy, but the idea is to still keep a medium content-quality threshold. The bot user just got banned, after less than an hour of running?

Is it possible to be unbaned? Is there a limit of posts/communities? Is there an higher content-quality threshold? I can change how the system works, but I wanted to ask for a possibility to be unbanned / recreate the account with infranging ToS, in order to build a better platform.

(P.S. The Nitrofuel bridge is also designed to slow the content output if the user partecipation goes up, in order to slowly fade away when a lot of other user-generated original high-quality content is posted; the final objective is to have the account officialiy deleted when the interested communities are fully-grown and there’s a sufficent amount of high-quality original content)

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[–] HolyFriedFish 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't have an answer, but I do have a question: what is the purpose of posting across multiple communities? I've been scrolling through my "all" feed and have seen several posts by your bot, mostly with the same title and link. It's annoying, but I would've personally just blocked your bot in the next half hour or so, I wouldn't have reported or expected to see it banned.

[–] djtech 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sorry for the incovenice; but the community helped me and I will (if the bot is allowed by the admins to keep going) use a corrected version that uses reposts in order to appear as link to one community and have common comments and no feed problems. (Should appear with the same rarity as a normal post and never appear again)
Yes, all titles and links are the same; at the moment the only topics built in the bot (as RSS feeds, HackerNews feeds and Lemmy communitys to post to) are Tech News, so the same news, talking of the same topics, published in similar communities, across different instances.
As said before, the idea is to add average-quality content to different communities (especcialy smaller ones) and different instances (especially smaller ones) , in order to add content to those communities. This isn't a "forever" type of solution: slowly, with the increase of high-quality original posts, the bot will post less posts and will stop posting on major communities. When everything is ready to set off (feeds full of high-quality original posts from different communities), the bot will be removed forever, leaving place only to the community, real soul of the Fediverse.

[–] HolyFriedFish 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Right, but my assumption - and maybe it's totally wrong - is that people probably follow multiple related communities, whether they're small or not, to get multiple sources of similar info. If that's the case, your bot effectively just spams their feeds. It sounds like your fix in your #1 may change that, which is nice.

Either way, I could see an argument for a ban being too strong a reaction. Especially because it's easy enough to block a bot as a user - I've blocked a few already.

[–] djtech 1 points 2 years ago

I think that your assumption is partly right: for larger instances, most people will follow multiple related communitites, but it's rare that they will follow smaller communities, especially if they are hosted on external smaller instances.

Anyways, the new fix should resolve the problem of the same "post" (not the same post from the same community, but the same post that the bot publishes on different communities). This will be tested and if it doesn't fix it, the bot will be closed forever.

I also have the suspicion that nobody banned the bot, but that the admins just put an automated system that if lots of post were made (i think my bot made about 150 in 45 mins across 15 communitites and 7 instances), it bans beacuse it's obviously automated. Yes, I also flagged the bot as a bot (beacuse it is, duh), that might have also induced the ban.