Personally I don’t mind it too much, as long as
- there’s no vote manipulation to artificially boost the post
- there are genuine interactions in the comments
- the account posting this is properly labelled as a bot account (if it’s an actual bot)
Just block it if it bothers you. Lemmy makes this ez pz.
I’m not infuriated by more content that we desperately need.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
All of those posts are heavily upvoted and have multiple comments though? Accreditation, etc. are all valid critiques, but I genuinely don’t understand why so many people care about the provenance of posts.
I post pictures of bread I bake and I’m on the upper lower middle side of mid for my baking skills.
If someone picks the best bread on a subreddit with a million members my posts will be buried instantly so what’s the point in adding real content?
I think that’s a bad analogy for a few reasons. First, all the examples you’ve posted are specifically meme template-friendly subs, which makes sense since they’re inherently easy to repost. I don’t think think a baking community would have that problem. But even if it did, you could just start a new baking community that bans reposts? Given how unpopular repost bots are, I assume your anti-repost baking community would be more popular than the hypothetical pro-repost baking community that your posts are buried in. Assuming that repost bots are drowning out more organic content, which prima facie doesn’t seem to be the case in either community you screenshotted as examples. Both seem like pretty solid examples of their being no other content.
Structurally speaking, up and down votes should ideally, roughly sort posts by quality. A post being buried (unpopular) in a community isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
If fear of not getting enough internet points is what’s keeping someone from posting, that’s more on them.
If I wanted to battle bots for engagement I’d be on reddit.
You’re not battling anyone for engagement because you’re not posting anything yourself. All you can offer is hyptheticals with no supporting evidence.
Why don’t you go hang out in /askscience or /askhistorians with Portnou if you want all organic content. He and his multiple personalities are posting there dozens of times per day and those communities are just popping off with content and activity.
kinda wierd for someone with a yr history that only posted a few things early on and then a few more 3 months ago who then also is on so unoften he does not recognize your handle to make this statement about your user. had to tag that.
Upset that your daily screenshots of the mod log aren’t getting much engagement? Perhaps you’re jealous that your reposts from /r/news aren’t getting as much traction as time2lose’s reposts? What engagement are you generating other than your current crusade against this specific user?
I don’t mind, if content is interesting. I was forced to post fairly big news no one else bothered with today.
I’d love a lemmy client that next to a username, it gives their post to comment ratio. That tends to give me a solid feel. If they don’t comment on their own posts ever, then they are not here to discuss.
That kind of check is easily evaded. Consider this bot posting automatic, what prevents it from replying to some comments by running it through AI?
You’re right, that’d be a really useful heuristic. I comment way more than I post, but whenever I do post, I always make sure to reply to at least a few of the comments people leave. It feels almost like a duty, and I’d feel bad if I didn’t at least try.
Yeah never been a fan of drive-by posting myself.
Truth be told, I was kind of hoping for a reply of “use this client, it does exactly that!” I’ll let you know if someone gives me one.
A day ago he reposted a meme about a doctor raping a woman because her credit card was declined and she couldnt pay for care.
Thats VILE.
In addition to the slimy pretending that his posts are organic traffic by not just marking his account as a bot, he is also importing the culture of casual sexism from reddit to the threadiverse.
Is that the incel on shit posting?
He’s like 14 or at least has the brain of one. I hate the sexist shit he always posts. Let’s keep 4chan shit like that on 4chan
📡📡📡 Lazy-ass poster with dumb emoji titles
enshittification is 100% complete
This is a lemmy problem.
an internet problem
I use browser so don’t get to see the little robot icon. Looking forward to a fix.
I think thats part of OPs tag for the user
Ah i see, and i did, thank you. I now also see the little chip icon, i saw that before and did not realise what it was. I am an idiot.
The worst part is the lack of transparency and credit to the actual authors. Many of the reposts are personal to the OOP, and it feels extra scummy.
Working on it!
And what happens when you get this detection wrong?
I’ll drop everything and come to piefed right now. On god.
Question though: How or will you differentiate between people who are scheduling mass posts from reddit from people who just saved memes that also happened to be there?
I hate the reddit reposts where the only interaction is on reddit … that defeats the point of lemmy\fediverse?
If you can detect it, you could auto ban them, no?
I think a rule against serial reposting would be fine and, probably, popular.
Isn’t that just a client side filter, would be up to whoever runs the community/instance rules for handling bot accounts, and if they feel the accounts should be banned.
I wouldn’t like a blanket rule like that. I think that dropdown menu in the screenshot is perfect. Especially if paired with a toggle in the community settings that lets the mods ban posts from them entirely.
I hate all of them, but I hate the ones not marked as bots more than those that are marked.
So I’m not looking for a fight, but can we have a friendly talk about the value of repost bots in the context of this medium? I just feel like yapping, so feel free to ignore if no.
Lemmy shares a format with Reddit - they’re feed aggregators. Their value proposition is having everything in one place so a community can pass judgment on it all. That’s why people hate reposts and bad faith actors, adverse or opaque sorting algorithms, and agenda-driven moderators - they directly devalue the medium. We tend to like original content, genuine sentiments and human connections, and relevant posts because those directly support the inherent value of a feed aggregator.
I’m not convinced either way about repost bots, yet. They’re clearly not genuine or original, and too many of them will tend to obscure - you know what? I got there in the end I see it now.
I could still see the value in a carefully chosen, rate-limited bot that reposts with the blessing of the moderators, but the rate and curation are important, and the rate has to take into account the number of other communities using them versus the number of active users, so it’s not trivial to decide what the right amount would be.
I guess I’m in the extreme minority, but like… All the posts in OP are heavily upvoted and spawned comments. That’s… good? I don’t see why people care more about where a post comes from than the fact that large stretches of the Threadiverse are barren and reposts are the only content available.
Sanitation is my most upvoted Threadiverse poster, and I’d rather have their content than nothing. Which, largely, is the alternative.
That’s what was giving me so much uncertainty in either direction, there’s always some gulf between how people act and what they say they want. You have to come at it not just from a metrics angle, but with a little wisdom as well. I think sure, people upvote bots like crazy and that’s probably why Reddit doesn’t get rid of them because it helps their metrics. We don’t rely on that financial model, and bots probably do stifle genuine discussion to some degree by sheer noise:signal. I could be swayed still, but I’d need to see solid evidence to show that bots actually help communities thrive. It’s probably highly contextual as well, some types of !c probably benefit from bots more than others would, but any bots will tend to dominate an /all feed.
Repost bots discourage new users and kill engagement.
Suppose you’re into trampolines but there’s no community for that here. You create one, and to kick start it you get a repost bot to repost from the other place.
Over the coming weeks a few fediverse users see your community but see that they’re all reposts with no comments, there’s nothing to really engage with there, so no one does.
Next month someone signs up to the fediverse and joins a few special interest communities. /c/sports, /c/gymnastics, and /c/trampolines. There might actually be real posts and discussions in /c/sports, but that new users feed is overrun with reposts in /c/trampolines. It’s a very clear signal that there’s no content here, all the content is on reddit.
If you actually want a community, then you can read about trampolines on the other site, and manually repost things yourself as a human.
I think it can work for meme/shitpost type communities. But anything hobby related you really need to add something to prompt actual discussion.
Although if you have a bot doing it there isn’t even any quality control.
Quality of engagement is important, you’re right. By the time I’d written everything out I’d already mostly thought myself almost all the way to being against bots, but this makes sense. Taking your position, bots gotta go.
Unfortunately they don’t create the same engagement as a natural post. No one wants to comment on a wall of bot posts with no human involved. All it does is kill actual community engagement. Lemmy and reddit are not just link aggregators, they are forums for discussion, with humans.
FIGHT!
The main issue for small subs can be solved with pinned threads.
The whole, where do I go to eat this here or what restaurant is good for this food or who does this kind of work locally or look at what I ate at so and so restaurant and you probably can imagine the theme here. Put into one post and ban whoever advertises. No need to repost pinned threads.
FINNISH HYMN
I think negative interaction is a good start. There’s a reason people get their posts deleted, shadow banned, or just banned.
Pinned threads solve for perpetual topics within (specific) communities sure, but the main area where too many repost bots will do the most harm if left unchecked is when cruising all or local. People who sort by new are the lifeblood of a feed’s (federated) community, and if there’s not enough of them to boost the most valuable signals, the (federated) community won’t grow and might even shrink.
Yep. I see this all over the new feed.
It’s stupid just reposting 100% from another place. If I wanted that, I’d just go there.
I do like that posters who seem ro manually post filter the stuff from other sites which in my opinion increases the average quality of posts. Reddit is a tidal wave with a few gems. The fediverse is mostly the gems, like using cheesecloth in a strainer.
You’d go to reddit?
