From what I can gather, a bot creates communities based on subreddits recommended to them by users, then fills said communities with posts from Reddit. I don’t really get the point of this, as 90% of posts it seems are just copied from Reddit but without any of the actual engagement, as the OP didn’t post it and no one is commenting. It just seems like clutter and a waste of space, but it’s also all over my feed. Anyone else confused?

  • Boz (he/him)
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    1 year ago

    I am not sure how I feel. It sounds like some people like it, which is great. There’s no particular reason not to do it, as long as no copyright issues arise. If it’s keeping people off Reddit, that’s an added bonus, but “people like it” is enough for me.

    Personally, though, I would like to see the fediverse genuinely replace Reddit, not just duplicate it and absorb its traffic. In my experience, that works best when you actually move on from the thing you’re trying to replace, rather than looking back at it all the time. Right now, a lot of us (including me) are still trying to process the break from Reddit, so we’re going to be thinking and talking about it a lot. It just seems like in the long term, it might be unhelpful to have that direct pipeline to Reddit, when we might otherwise just not think about it anymore.