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

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year 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.

        • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            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.

        • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          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!”

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            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.