It reminds me how Imgur is often discussing images that were uploaded for Reddit and OP will never know about all the comments.
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.
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.
I don’t like them.
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
Highly recommend just blocking the bot you’re referring to.
Pointless spam. If you’re going to dig content from somewhere, maybe pick someplace we haven’t all already been.
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…
I’m hoping it will happen naturally. I am inclined to think those of us who left reddit early are less lurkers than the users who will leave later. That means most of the users who left reddit early in the blackout are the more active users. Still, we need to double down on our activity to get things going here. It reminds me of a message on mastodon when the twitter exodus happened. There was encouragement to comment on toots, even if it was something small, just to make the OPs feel they were being heard/read. We should strive for the same here, specially considering there might be another wave of users coming this way after the 30th.
I’ve been making a conscious effort to reply to posts I find interesting, even if I’m just adding a sentence or two and not the most engaging of content. At least it helps get things started, I think.
My problem is that I’m experiencing a bug wherein I don’t get notifications when people reply to me unless they @ me, so I can only see if somebody has by going back and looking at my own comments through my profile. I assume that’ll eventually be fixed, but if others are experiencing the same bug, that will be a huge drag on discussion.
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.
Reddit has really become overrun with the garbage comments in recent years.
It’s like all of the sudden everyone decided they were a comedian and reddit threads were the place to test their new material.
It really has been a huge piece of what’s been killing the appeal for me recently.
I really hope the fediverse isn’t going to be completely overrun with “this”, “this is the way”, “fuck around and find out”. FFS, people, try to have an original thought.
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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.
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.
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 malelivingspace@lemmit.online. 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.
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.
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.
Harmful. It’s noise pollution. It dilutes human contribution and makes it harder to engage with other people.
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).
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.Yeah, I’m guessing it wouldn’t even be priority at this point.
Lemmy actually has this feature already. Accounts can mark themselves as a bot and also whether they see bot accounts. Because of that, I can’t imagine it would be a lot of work to implement on kbin.
Yeah you can filter out bot accounts but presumably there maybe other types of bot posts that might be relevant or interesting. I’m still so new to Lemmy that I don’t know yet so I’m hesitant to block them all like that
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.
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.
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.
you can turn off that you see pot posts in your profile/settings
I dont think that those bots will be as dominant as now in the future when more community content comes in. When that time comes i think even the mods know that they getting more and more obsolete
Ok, Now Lemmy Explain:
Suppose that the bot was temporary, as you say, then why would anybody bother making original content here when the bot is just going to drown them out? At what level of “community content” is this thing going to be stopped?
In time, it would just get more and more entrenched as nobody would actually be making real original content here. It’s like a drug addiction, we will be dependent on the bot to feed us from reddit, and it will prolong the life of reddit indefinitely like a parasite.
We like Lemmy because the people and community here are thoughtful and kind, unlike the horrible discourse at reddit, but how do you know that bringing the reddit directly here would not make people become spiteful and argumentative redditors again? When will we stop being redditors?
Suppose the reddit migration on July 1st does happen, do you think they would be impressed that they left reddit only to find the new place to be exactly like reddit but with less activity? No, they will all just go back to that burning house, and all of this will have been for nothing.
I’m sorry that I’m getting emotional about this, but this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
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Well, need a new vocabulary for a new place. Again, my stance has been consistent: We are not redditors anymore, we do not belong there, Lemmy should be a place for people, we keep the good of reddit and kick out the bad, and bots are certainly not people.
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Appreciate you taking a stand. I felt it’s like that Nazi punk in the bar story, there should be no tolerance for hate, and there should be no tolerance for bots.
Otherwise, my “Barbie” shilling will get way less funny.
Sorry that i made you sad
I still support the bots but i see the danger that when they get used too much that it kills a community at the start when they over do it so it should be handled with A LOT OF CARE.
I suggest to reach out to the moderators or make posts adressing the issue in the communities and trying to find solutions for the problem or to ask if the bots are even welcomed.
The problem that caused that they even use the bots should be the small amount of content.
But if the bot content scares people off that is a another problem that should be talked about in the communities.I think the new mods have a lot of times no real idea what to do so they make desitions because it seemed good at some point.
I personally switched off that i can see the bots so maybe that is why “i dont see the problem”
litterally…i only realised now that what i wrote may be morally very bad
Edit: i forgot to tell that i think the bots should be very temporary
