this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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No Stupid Questions

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No such thing. Ask away!

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It reminds me how Imgur is often discussing images that were uploaded for Reddit and OP will never know about all the comments.

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[–] Geek_King 64 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The main thing driving my enjoyment of Lemmy is the people and real responses. Having bots just copy and paste existing posts from Reddit with no human behind the post isn't driving engagement. I haven't seen a single reddit repost by a bot get a single comment or community interaction at all.

I'm against it, it feels like a garbage in garbage out type of situation.

[–] s38b35M5 18 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

There's a lemmy community I used to be subbed to with a mod that decided to grab every recent and new post from /r/ and repost here. No comments on 4 of 5 posts, and one or two on the remaining 1 of 5. New posts every 3 to 5 minutes. Many readers thought it was a bot, and on a meta post in the sub, a different mod said they aren't a bot, they're doing a great job, and we should block the mod.

Did that and unsubbed. Now my "new" feed isn't full of reposted, zero-engagement posts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Yes, when I see my feed have 5 or 6 posts in a row from the same poster within a few minutes and with no discussion, not even an initial comment or indication as to why someone thought it worth posting, I block that person...

When the same article is posted to, for example, any Lemmy community on any instance with the word 'news' in it, that duplication grinds my gears.

Now that I've been here a bit, I realise that it's the discussion that is way better than the post, (normally) and there's no faking that (yes, yes, chatgpt etc etc, but no, pleeeease).

[–] magnetosphere 52 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I’m not in favor of it at all. If a human user wants to link to something interesting/relevant, fine, but I’m not excited about bots spamming links.

[–] impulse 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That bot is an absolute menace. Often I come across a thread that would probably interest me, then I see 0 comments and the standard bot message and move on.

It also feels like it is really spamming those threads, which does not help the situation.

Personally, I would love to see it removed.

[–] GlitzyArmrest 4 points 2 years ago

Highly recommend just blocking the bot you're referring to.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Harmful. It's noise pollution. It dilutes human contribution and makes it harder to engage with other people.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, at least if it's everything. I don't necessarily mind if content from Reddit is being recycled to here, as long as it's sparingly selected. By a human or maybe by a bot if the content passes through certain thresholds (X amount of upvotes or something, idk).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I say allow it if it can be opted out. Having a 'repost' or 'bot' tag, and a filter would solve it for me.
But it might be a lot of work to implement.

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[–] kratoz29 27 points 2 years ago

I don't like them.

[–] Candelestine 26 points 2 years ago

Pointless spam. If you're going to dig content from somewhere, maybe pick someplace we haven't all already been.

[–] Cybermass 24 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I fucking hate it and I wish it would stop, links to literally anything other than Reddit, if I wanted to open Reddit all the time I would just reinstall Reddit.

[–] Little8Lost 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

in your profile/settings you can turn off to see bot posts.

I think every bot that fills a place with cheap stolen content is more there to have some content for new people that they dont feel lost.
So i think they are good until there is enough content and then i think it would be okay to repost the top of the week every week.

[–] Cybermass 5 points 2 years ago

I'm fine with repost bots that actually REPOST.

If it's literally just a title and a link to Reddit with to copy/paste in the text field or anything then it's trash and it's completely useless.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've left subs that seem to be largely a bot reposting Reddit content. The posts seem to get no comments and it all feels a bit empty and soulless. Plus, if we want to be something other than a straight Reddit clone then copying Reddit posts over here doesn't seem the way to do it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I'm worried that people think I'm a bot because I like to post articles and don't get much discussion usually.

I'm not sourcing them from reddit though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Yeah, I have that fear so have been throttling back my posting. I wouldn't worry as the examples I am thinking of are pretty obvious like [email protected]. That instance has a community where you can request communities and a bot starts them. At least in this case, there is a bot that just imports the posts from the relevant sub.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's so crazy to me, like, why outsource our content to reddit?

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[–] Mindlight 21 points 2 years ago (3 children)

one thing that I've noticed the last week when using Lemmy is that content is slowly coming along but the discussions are somewhat lacking.

Reddit offers a shitload of topics and content but the real reason we were there was for the comments and the discussions.

Bots reposting material can be a way to artificially secure the constant flow of topics but we need to throw some gasoline on the discussion bonfire....

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

When 90% of the comments are sarcastic or jokes like Reddit I can't call that discussion or engaging. It's noise just like all of the reposts and duplicate content.

I've been on kbin (the fediverse) for over a week and I feel the opposite of your sentiment. The content was lacking but discussion is A+. Content is definitely picking up steam now, but I don't want the fediverse to be a reddit clone.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

No thanks. I left Reddit for a reason.

[–] squigglemonster 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think it might be okay in the early stages of a community when they're trying to grow a user base, "build it and they will come" sort of thing. But spamming more content than the community can keep up with is just annoying. I think they should be tweaked to only post a certain number of times per day so there's a chance to get some meaningful engagement on each thread.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I think the best solution would be to have an API affordance for it. Have some sort of historical boolean field that lets you import the content but keeps it from showing up in feeds.

That's way you can move your community's history over to a new home without drowning out other content

[–] Dark_Blade 11 points 2 years ago

I hate it. Rather than filling this place up with junk, we should have users post what they want to post.

Doesn’t even have to be original, really; just…no botspam.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

There's no reason to comment on a conversational post where the OP doesn't exist

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

i don't think they're good

[–] GlitzyArmrest 10 points 2 years ago

I block every repost bot I find. I don't care about reddit's content. If I wanted that, I'd go there. Create content for the community here, not just noise. Most bot posts don't even get any engagement because their posts are soulless.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

@CthulhuDreamer I don’t like it personally. It just gives more traffic to Reddit

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't like the idea. But if it is going to happen it shouldn't be a bot alone, but an instance that only connects to reddit content, e.g it would virtually federate reddit as a virtual instance. That way people would need to explicitly subscribe to the subs otherwise you wouldn't see it at all.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

As a developer of one of those bots, this depends on the types of posts. The bots like the World News bot that repost enough articles to provide content without saturating the community don't cause problems and fit the purpose of a link aggregator. Bots reposting content that are meant to be engaged with directly, are missing context or are being posted too frequently for the local community to engage with are annoying. My bot is a high-volume poster like lemmit.online and I treat it like an read-only feed instead of something that is supposed to be a substitute for a real community, so it sits alone on its own instance and doesn't try to hide the fact that it's a reposting bot.

[–] MargotRobbie 9 points 2 years ago (10 children)

They are bad content. If I wanted the garbage hose from reddit, I would have just stayed on reddit, but I don't.

My vote is on an instance level ban on all reddit repost bots.

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[–] blackbelt352 9 points 2 years ago

I'm not super keen on repost bots. Lemmy doesn't need to have what reddit has, it just needs to be a good content aggregator.

Reposting from Reddit doesn't bring anything new to the table and just sends people back to reddit.

Side note but I'm not quite getting the comparison between bots on lemmy and OPs on Imgur. Imgur was initially created specifically to host images that people were going to post on Reddit because Reddit's ability to host images was basically non-existent. It wasn't originally supposed to be an alternative to Reddit, it was there to supplement Reddit.

Lemmy is a completely separate thing from Reddit. Similar to how Reddit isn't Digg, back when Digg did the same sort of "screw over the userbase" that Reddit is doing now.

[–] JTskulk 8 points 2 years ago

Great, do it. I don't care where the content comes from, as long as it's interesting. I'd rather stay here than go back to reddit.

[–] nahida 7 points 2 years ago

I made a bot to repost official announcements for a game I play. Ideally, a day will come where the company makes the announcements themselves on Lemmy and my bot is no longer needed, but until then, the owner of the sub has granted me permission to use my bot.

My bot makes about one or two posts per day. Other people in this thread have mentioned certain bots making posts every couple minutes, which many people would find quite excessive.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the bots, I'd rather spend my time discussing things here are interested in, rather than something that nobody here really felt like adding.

[–] DryTurnover 5 points 2 years ago

Eh, content is content.

[–] Noxvento 4 points 2 years ago

Some good quality posts, yes. All? No!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I hate them and I've blocked every single one of those repost bots I've come across.

[–] Ogygus 4 points 2 years ago

Good for this transitional phase.

Problem is, why would people comment on the issue on lemmy, instead of reddit?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I feel like if the OP wanted the post on Lemmy, they'd have posted it on Lemmy. There is no benefit to puppeting reddit posts for anyone involved.

[–] pandarisu 4 points 2 years ago

Not a fan, I've been blocking the repost bots when I see them

[–] Aceticon 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Surely people who want Reddit can go to Reddit and those who don't want it won't?

Seems to me that bots cloning Reddit into Lemmy would mainly be imposing Reddit stuff on people who don't want Reddit.

[–] GustavoM 3 points 2 years ago

At the same level of importance than someone who posts obscenities and other "unique" oddities just to "troll".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

It's senseless and annoying.

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