this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Pulling news from Reddit and posting it here (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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A few years ago I created a Telegram channel which pulls around 10 top voted news every day from r/Vancouver and post it there: https://t.me/vancitynews It's a handy way to get local news, try it out

Now I'm thinking: Is it a good idea to automatically post those news here to spark a discussions and make this community more alive? Is it even allowed to automatically post anything? What do you think?

I'm pretty sure that the new Reddit policy will not affect my channel which calls reddit.com just a handful times per day

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Personally I think, it should be generally ok to rip content of Reddit, but it should happen manually rather than via a bot.

  • Not everything that makes it to the top of a subreddit is quality content.
  • By manually picking and choosing what to repost here, it would give more control to the users of c/Vancouver on how to mold and grow their own community instead of just replicating what's over there.

We have the chance to create something new and distinct here in its vibe. A bot might hinder that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i agree with what they brought up, as we probably don't want c/vancouver to be a carbon copy of r/vancouver, however i also think that fetching some valuable pieces of news (perhaps some of u/cyclinginvancouver's posts, for instance) automaticatically here might make sense, at least initially?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm going to reach out to u/cyclinginvancouver and see if they want to come over here as well. u/xlxoo would be a good addition too.

If they aren't interested in migrating here or cross-posting here with their blessing I think a bot that cross-posts their Reddit submissions once they reach a certain threshold of upvotes on Reddit here could be very beneficial while making sure it's not "spammy"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

From my experience on Mastodon, not a lot of people liked bots, not sure if that’s the same vibe here, give it another week, I’m sure the CEO will fuck up more. I’m not against cross posting though to get started.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know. There seems to be some openness on Mastodon to bots that are properly labelled as such, in my experience. I'd say open a bot account here and use it to give the crossposting a shot. Anyone who doesn't like it can easily block the bot account and move on with their day.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I did s quick research, there are plenty of lemmy bots libraries, however I'm having a hard time finding how to get credentials for programmatic access. Any suggestions or links?

[–] Shell 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For example, in the first link, where to get "auth" string to make a post under a particular account? When I registered an account I got name and password, my understanding that there should be also some way to get some security token for the programmatic access. This is what I'm struggling to find

[–] Shell 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Check out the way this project is doing it. Looks like it's just a post to an endpoint that gets a jwt

https://github.com/db0/pythorhead/blob/main/pythorhead/auth.py

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks, works as a charm. Just created (and deleted) my first post programmatically. I managed to do it with using Lemmy.ca instance, but not through the account hosted on Lemmy.world. Why?

[–] Shell 1 points 1 year ago

That's awesome to hear seeing as though this is the code I was planning on using for my project. As for your issue, it looks like you set the URL when you create the class object here

lemmy = Lemmy("https://lemmy.dbzer0.com")

Did you put the lemmy.ca URL in there? Try changing that to the lemmy.world URL and see if it works like you expect

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Let the user base grow organically. Otherwise, you're going to introduce too much fluff. At best, start with the most popular daily post, track engagement, and go from there?

[–] Shell 3 points 1 year ago

Please do this! One of the things I miss from Reddit is the Vancouver sub but I refuse to go back. As opposed to the other user, I'd like to see a bot that posts everything. I can decide what is quality content and what isn't. Either way I'm really hoping you'll get something going. I'm (slowly) working on a media bot that will repost to Lemmy communities from Reddit. I'm a Stack overflow coder (I suck) but if you have any questions msg me. I'll do my best to help!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I like the idea personally. I do agree that direct ripping would just be circumventing reddit while also using its content directly (moreso in the case of text posts/questions to the community) but I believe alongside participation from the community here on Lemmy it would add variety to the community and get more discussion going, which is overall a net positive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey, I've been put in place as the moderator of this community as well as /c/BritishColumbia.

I have experience creating an offshoot community of r/Vancouver when I took over r/NiceVancouver.

The bot is a good idea but organically posted content is much more effective. I would kindly ask that at this time you turn it off for right now but I would be very interested in touching base with you in private to see what you can do with your skills to grow the community. I have at least one idea from a comment on this thread that would be easy to implement.

At this point unfortunately the bot comes off more as spam than anything positive that users will want to engage with.

Many people on Reddit know me, once word gets out that I'm here, the community will liven up really quick I think.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is a first test run: https://lemmy.ca/post/789322

Let me know what you think

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