Comments

• cheeseball@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I think this is great, thank you for doing this. The bots that just repost content from Reddit are useless. Generates zero discussion. Especially the ones that copy content from AITA or other similar communities. If the OP is not there to answer questions or respond, what’s the point?

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  • Cube6392@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The bots that duplicate over every single comment also aren’t useful, IMO. The comment sections for those posts are so full of bot comments that a human user won’t see any opportunity to create an engagement hook. And if another human DID comment, its so lost in the noise that no one will probably see it or respond. Further, since votes aren’t replicated over, horrible odious comments that got voted into oblivion get copied over with equal weight as good comments

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  • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There is this Reddit scraper bot that does it much better: github.com/daniel-lxs/BotIt

    It can be configured to only scrape highly upvoted external links and that works quite well on one of our communities.

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    • venusenvy47@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Can you mention the community name? I would actually be interested in a community that shows just highly upvoted, as opposed to everything.

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  • ApeNo1@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Exactly. If there is no chance of some interesting engagement from OP or others then it is just noise. I have been trying to engage more in Lemmy than I used to in Reddit and I was wondering how to block these type of posts, especially from Reddit, in a more manageable way.

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• yarn@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Yeah, the repost bots just don’t work. Reading the comments is half the fun of using reddit/lemmy, but lemmy has a very small userbase still, so the comments are a little bit slow moving. Having a ton of reposts suddenly spammed in splits that small comment activity up to the point where comments basically don’t exist and you’re viewing a slideshow of empty threads.

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• antik@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Sorry to hear about your personal situation, but that is quite the silver lining and I am sure Lemmy as a whole will benefit greatly from it. Solid ruleset on bots as well. We are currently rolling out rules about bots on Lemmy World as well, reading this we might have to go over some of them again. We don’t want to stomp out all bots because some are problematic.

  🫶 from Lemmy World

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• Sophrosyne@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  When I see a community that is all bot generated content from Reddit, it’s an instablock for me. Thanks for cracking down.

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• Mermitian@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Great news, honestly! I rather have less content, but actual interaction than all those bots reposting.

  And I’ll try to check out your stream, sounds really interesting! Hopefully my internet will be also agree, haha

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• lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Thank you thank you thank you! I was just feeling extremely annoyed last night when my entire feed was nothing but YouTube reposts from a bot. If that’s what I wanted to look at, I would just go to YouTube. I think this will be an overall very positive change.

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  • WarmSoda@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They definitely have certain times that they post, I’ve noticed. I’ve been on overnight a couple times (EST) and New gets flooded with bot posts.

    That may be because there’s less people posting so they show up more, but I don’t think so. I’ve seen nothing but pages of bot posts all in a row. I never see that during the day.

    I for one welcome our new human overlords.

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• user_already_exists@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Lemm.ee and @sunaurus@lemm.ee have been rocking it from day 1. You take good care of your community, Ty.

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• ChaRRdude33@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m all for post that generate discussion and interest. Repost bots do none of that so let’s get rid of them…

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  • Rognaut@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Absolutely, I'm all about the human interaction here. The bots on that other site made some posts or communities feel like ghost towns. I don't want any bot posts.

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• Boinketh@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I think cracking down on bots is a great idea. I hope there’s a way to deal with existing bots too.

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• Terevos@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Fine by me. I’ve already blocked a few bot accounts that were spam posting

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• colforge@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I for one fully support this course of action. I’ve been blocking these bots left and right to keep my Local feed from being completely cluttered with posts that aren’t generating engagement, but I’d be more than happy to not need to.

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• JakenVeina@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Bots should not be responsible for the majority of content in any community

  I think this could maybe be qualified a little bit. I think of communities like /r/news or /r/worldnews, and they are quite largely just links from other news sources, that are then discussed, and they’re a type of community I myself really valued from reddit, before moving here.

  I don’t think the argument is fair that you should just use RSS if you want aggregation, communities focused on “link aggregation” (which is what Lemmy is on paper, is it not? a “link aggregator”?) provide SO much more. Off the top of my head, communities and community discussion can bypass paywalls, identify misleading headlines, point out related stories or context… I don’t see the problem with communities like this having links seeded by bots. One could argue it actually helps fight bias.

  I am 100% on board with ditching all the reddit-scraping bots. Reddit posts are not primary sources of anything.

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  • fievel@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Completely agree with you, some slight difference should be applied to this rule to state clearly what should be avoided and what is valuable.

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• rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Some bot content is okay, but I agree it should be moderated. Thanks for your effort on this, no disagreement.

  Also, thanks for your contributions to making Lemmy great!

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• Master@lemdro.id ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Thank you again. I’ve had some issues with bots taking over my feeds. Zero engagement bots dont seem to have a place though I can understand the appeal of them for archiving.

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• mechatux@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • willnever_fadeaway@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    My opinion is that it’s a horrible bot, if I didn’t block it, it would be all over my local feed

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  • selawdivad@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    First bot I blocked.

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• iesou@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m all for this!

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• orcrist@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Repost bots need to be regulated in volume. Otherwise this instance becomes an aggregator, and we already have RSS for that.

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• Navarian@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m all for pretty much all of these changes. The only thing I’d give feedback on is specifically this line.

  Bots should not have a disruptive influence on a community

  I think this needs a clear definition, before I can say that I agree with that.

  Just my thoughts.

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• LedgeDrop@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I really think the “simple” approach of categorizing bot VS non-bot and federate vs defederate are only masking the underlying problem : all posts do not have the same amount of “value”.

  However, with Lemmy they do. And I think this is what’s broken. If you or anyone in the community has time or interest, I think focusing on rewriting the “what’s hot” algorithm would reduce/remove many of these “workarounds” (like the one you’re suggesting).

  (I’m just thinking out loud) but a better “what’s hot” would have each post weighted:

  1. Against the number of people subscribed to a channel (more subscribers == more relevance)
  2. Against the average number of comments by different users/ post / community. (many comments from different users == more relevant) This would implicitly address the issue of bot spam, that you mentioned.
  3. An upper limit on new topics / community. This would avoid the meme community from hijacking all of “what’s hot”.

  Of course this cannot all be done in real time. Things like “average number of comments per post” could be precalculated daily, but I think it’ll be “good enough” and a radical improvement to what Lemmy currently offers.

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• JudahBenHur@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  sounds good

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• OutrageousUmpire@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  All these rules seem sensible and should crack down on bot content. Thanks for thinking this out.

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• Demigodrick@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Ahh I’m not going to catch this live but would love to see this. You’ve done so much to help out with Lemmy (and helped me personally with my instance!) So super interested to see this.

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• baconeater@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m of mixed opinion about this. I only subscribe to one bot-led community (!comics@lemmit.online) and whilst I hate that every comic is just reposted from Reddit by the bot and so has no comments or discussion, it seems that no comic creators are posting to Lemmy yet and so I would rather still be able to see the content they are creating than miss it entirely. I understand that both the community and the bot are hosted on lemmit.online so they won’t be affected by the bot policy of lemm.ee but it still speaks to the problem of lack of content posted to Lemmy in general (at least in certain communities).

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• dizzy@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Thank you.

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• dusk@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Will it still be possible to view posts by bots on different instances? Kbin.social blocks these from being visible as far as I recall

  One of the anime communities utilises a bot to generate discussion posts with links to relevant information as episodes come out for convenience, given the purpose of the community being for discussions, would this be another legitimate use that the rules could account for?

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• Rambler@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  A very insightful explanation of something that I think sorely needed addressing. Thank you for doing this.

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• Grimm@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I support these new rules.

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• WarmSoda@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  If you browse lemm.ee not logged in at the time of this comment all you see are pages of bots reposting reddit threads. There’s no way anyone that sees that decides “oh this place is cool, I’m going to sign up”.

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• fievel@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I think this might be useful for some kind of automatic aggregation of content from other communities or some specific cases. For example, I liked, when I was on reddit, the subreddit RedditRead on which each post was generated from other subreddit comments, one post by book found in the comment on a specific post in another subreddit. I thought about setting up the same here when I have a bit more time… Now, the posts would be all generated but users could still comments, so it’s not purely artificial stuff…

  Maybe one alternative would be to authorize such bot content generated communities but clearly flags them as such in the community sidebar or so. So people who are ok with generated content can subscribe and those who don’t like can block.

  In a general way, I have bad feeling about strong rules (except for stuff obviously wrong or destructive but here I don’t think it’s the case), and prefer case by case monitoring. In some cases it can be good for the community and in other very bad, and I find that saying just “it’s forbidden” is too easy and frustrating decision.

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• MyOpinion@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Sounds like a great policy!

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