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
Hate repost bots, if you want to use one as a back-er-up-er-er it should post to a dedicated community intended to be an archive, not the main communities for a topic, they are practically spam and don’t promote any conversation in the comments as people avoid commenting on something that has zero connection to the original poster of the question.
a dedicated community intended to be an archive
That’s the intention of lemmit.online, but it leaks. It should just be a stand alone instance not federated to anywhere else.
Disagree. If it’s tagged as a bot account, you can ignore it. You can block the community, instance, individual bots.
While I don’t like them, other people do. This isn’t a community where staffers currate, it’s a place of free federation. By joining Lemmy you agree to use your time to curate your own content.
Sure. Only this is not content - it’s just spam.
I find it very hard to believe there’s a single user that finds any value in reposting /r/AITA posts. Without the comments the questions have no value as content.
Interesting timing with this making All yesterday. https://lemm.ee/post/10568520
That’s not an /r/AITA post.
Additionally, you’ll notice that the post that hit all is a cross post from an actual user. The original post from the bot has no upvotes and no comments.
IMO, this is really just evidence that the bot is counter productive.
Oh good catch, and point.
I 100% agree, for me. But while I find it hard to believe, some people may want it. They may run their own instance and subscribe to archive the content. They may just like to read it. I have no idea how crazy people are. All that being said, I’m in favor or separate archive communities.
There’s a tech news bot that regularly gets a lot of community engagement, so blocking all bot accounts would also block part of the good stuff.
You can block the community, instance, individual bots.
You actually can’t block instances. Blocking individual communities and bots when there are so many is terrible UX.
Well I didn’t see the option when I looked just now.
Edit: nvm found it
Repost bots are universally dogshit and should be forbidden.
News reposts can add value.
Absolutely Fucking not, full stop. Not indiscriminately spamming everything posted on Reddit with no user interaction, it makes the fediverse look dead
If you wanna repost shit that’s fine, but not 10k posts at a fucking time
Hard disagree. You’re going to get more engagement if there are posts to discuss. News was one of the main reasons I was on reddit, and the reposts here are a big part of why I don’t visit reddit at all anymore. Sure I want to discuss the news and wish there were more commenters in each post, but at least the news is still showing up here. News without much conversation beats no news at all.
Go check out the average comment count on a post from Lemmit.online
I’ll wait.
Manual posts are fine. Not bot posts. If I wanted to see every news article, I’d just go to a news site or use an RSS reader. Not every news article needs commentary, and not every news article is interesting enough to warrant being posted here.
If the content feed is what’s valuable and can be reposted to Lemmy, it gives people one less reason to stay on Reddit.
No it doesn’t. Comments and engagement are what drives communities and the bots kill that. Someone pops in from Reddit, sees nothing but shit from Reddit? They’re gonna go back to Reddit. It’s fucking asinine.
This, 100%. I’d rather see 10 posts with a bunch of comments than 150 posts with no comments.
I can get news anywhere.
Especially with the frequency that these repost bots post, it’s just drowns out real posts and makes lemmy look like a bot farm.
Repost pots are kinda my personal hatred on Lemmy, my block list is ridiculous
Can’t wait for instance blocking so zerobyte or whatever the repost instance is called can be removed from my life forever.
Zerobyte and Lemmit
For what it’s worth, many apps like Boost and Sync can do this locally.
Oooo that’s certainly a handy feature.
You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you seem to be assigning your opinion to me as well.
I didn’t leave reddit because the content was bad. I left because they stopped supporting mobile apps. That seems to be why most people left to be honest.
Lemmy is my one stop shop for news and social media. If there were not news stories being reposted from Reddit then Lemmy would not be a suitable reddit replacement.
No one is assigning their opinion to you. We each have our own competing opinions which we are advocating for.
If you stop the bots, actual people will start posting actual content like an actual community.
AITA is one of the worst karmafarming subs to exist on Reddit. 4chan is more reliably truthful than that place.
Yeah not a fan of it for all of the reasons you stated.
I blocked the bot. No engagement with the AITH OP, which was half the fun
Yeah I feel like these kinds of bots only make sense where what’s valuable is the content feed (like r/EarthPorn), which can be stolen and put on Lemmy, and not the discussion, which gets lost.
I don’t even like the AITA subreddit. It’s precisely that kind of validation that annoys me the most of a social community. In the case of /r/AITA, it’s just so “on your face”. People rarely will tell the truth about their topics, even when they do, why go so harsh about themselves? Why not ask “Am I wrong here?”, "Am I committing a mistake?, “Will I regret this?” instead of a “Am I the asshole?”. Don’t you think very self-entitled people will come and tell you “fuck yes! YATA”?
Ah, anyway, no, bots that can crosspost from other communities shouldn’t be allowed. We also shouldn’t try to replicate every successful/popular community, especially if it’s a toxic one.
I think that that bot might actually be preventing the AITA community from growing. Yeah, it’s easy enough to block the bot. I don’t disagree with that at all.
The majority of new users may look at the community and see nothing but bot posts. I don’t know about you, but if all I see on a community are bot posts, I tend to skip that community. I don’t always care to go digging through numerous posts to see if it’s worth it to block a bot. Doubly so, if there is so much bot posting that the normal posts are practically hidden. A new user may just assume that the community is intended for bots and just skip it altogether.
I don’t care about AITA anymore to be honest, but too many bot posts can definitely hinder the growth of a community. I think that would be true for many communities.
Imo, it’s a touch worse when the community is based on personal stories. No one will really benefit from voting/discussing. Instead, you’re reading posts that someone else intended for another group on another website. There isn’t really a lot of “community” that you can get with that. Short story readers group, I guess? The actual OP certainly won’t get any of the input.
I can’t say it better!
Not for AITA, but I once wrote a long emotional response to a relationship reddit repost without realizing it what it really was. Only after hitting send did I finally see. It really sucked because I thought I was helping the OP with some advice and comfort and felt like a huge idiot afterwards.
So, yea… there’s no real value in reposting these kinds of messages if you can’t even reach out to the OP. And it just feels kind of scummy to be discussing these kinds of issues without the OP even being able to read along.The bot should really be bidirectional. Like message the Reddit OP if there are replies here / respond to the original thread. But I don’t think Reddit would allow that
No. The bot shouldn’t exist.
No, reddit should be reddit and lemmy should be lemmy.
Lemmy should be Lemmy
Man you’re missing the entire point of federation. The whole idea is it’s not just one site.
The whole idea is that there’s no single point of control.
The whole idea does not include dumping spam from whatever other sites on lemmy. No one is interacting with this crap.
Not if they found out
Why repost the content here if you’ll never reach the poster?
I encourage stealing from these communities: aww, askhistorians
I discourage stealing from: any of the innumerable fake story subreddits.
I’m not a fan of reposting AITA content. The fun is in the comments, which you don’t get here.
In a word, asinine.
Who thought this would be a good idea? I also find the tendency of making shoddy subReddit replicas is bankrupt and devoid of imagination. It’s like when the British pilgrims voyaged for weeks across the Atlantic into uncharted territory, only to found their new towns with the same fucking name as the place they just left.
I mostly agree with you, but Reddit has such unique and niche ideas that it’s kinda hard not to use them.
You could probably just make a bot to generate AITA stories, they would be the same quality
Let’s give it a shot. From GPT-4:
Hey, Reddit, I need your judgment on a bizarre situation that happened last night. So, my buddies and I were having a late-night bonfire in my backyard, sharing some beers and good laughs. It was a typical evening until the unthinkable happened.
Out of nowhere, blinding lights appeared in the sky, and we all saw this massive UFO hovering above us. We were absolutely terrified, frozen in shock. Then, these weird, short creatures with big heads and huge eyes emerged from the spacecraft.
Here’s where the controversy comes in: While my friends were panicking and trying to hide, I somehow mustered the courage to approach the aliens. They communicated with me telepathically and said they wanted to take me on board their ship to learn about human culture.
Without consulting my friends, I decided to go with them! I mean, how often do you get the chance to represent all of humanity to extraterrestrial beings, right? So, I went on board, and we had some kind of intergalactic cultural exchange.
Fast forward to this morning, they brought me back to my backyard, and my friends were furious with me. They said I abandoned them and left them to deal with the aliens alone. They claim they had a terrifying ordeal while I was up there having some sort of alien tea party.
So, Reddit, AITA for leaving my friends behind during this bizarre alien abduction? Did I prioritize my own curiosity over their safety? Or should I be forgiven because, well, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?
TL;DR: I left my terrified friends to have an intergalactic cultural exchange with aliens during an abduction. They’re angry, but I thought it was a unique opportunity. AITA?
I agree, I think it does more harm than good.
A repost bot could provide some value if it’s reposting say news articles or sports scores. Even then you would need to find a way to make sure the posts have some value and are not just spam. However if the purpose of the post was to provide some sort of advice to the OP, the repost is worthless.
Block the lemmit.online bot and you’re good to go. The guy who created it, made it for personal use, and it’s not going anywhere. If it’s on your instance, that means somebody found it useful.
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.
You only federate (content/communites) with stuff that’s been subscribed to by your users or vice versa.
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.
All you have to do is block @bot@lemmit.online
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.
you should convince your admin to defederate from lemmit.online
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 way, I would still be able to access my beloved content without being beholden to Reddit’s mood swings and abusive relationship tendencies.
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?!
Besides that, I also know that Content is King. […] I figured it would be better to have some inorganic content to bootstrap the adoption of Lemmy.
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.
Just block it. I blocked it months ago.
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.
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.
Honest the god lemmit.online is the worst fucking thing to happen to Lemmy. It single-handedly makes every community look dead and flooded with bot posts
It has its own communities. It doesn’t flood others. These communities are even requested by people on the instance lol. Also at the top of every post is describing where it’s from with a link and the original ops username.
Moderation issues, missing admins, kbin moderation not federating and a bunch of others things are a lot worse things.
If you’re a new Lemmy user popping into your all feed on an instance federated with spammit.online, your perception of Lemmy is hundreds of reposts with no comments and no engagement, all pointing you back to Reddit. It’s asinine
I understand all the complaints but also don’t find it that serious. I’ve also had the bot blocked for awhile now though too so maybe it’s just gotten a lot worse. I find a lot of other communities worse for my eyeballs like dongs and furries but I have those blocked too.
The biggest problem is when someone comes here from Reddit, you know what they see by default? A bunch of bullshit from Reddit, linking back to Reddit.
I really don’t feel like this point should need to be beaten like this but repost bots harm Lemmy as a whole and should at best not be allowed to federate content
Thanks, I did that now. Didn’t realize so far that the entire instance is just about replicating reddit. So for me that should do the trick.
