Update: so, the responses this far are almost universally that these bots have been blocked by users of the community. There is also a general disinterest in defederating, which is on brand.

You guys wanna do a poll or something or?

I’d like to lead my thoughts with a quote from the admins regarding bots within lemm.ee:

“Bots must not be responsible for the majority of content in any community”

There are two entire instances that immediately spring to mind, zerobytes.monster’s b0t user, and lemmit.online. Their content is quite literally 90% bot content with 0 engagement, and they spam constantly.

Now here at lemm.ee we generally don’t defend from stuff, that’s actually why I prefer this instance. Yes, you can block the bot users and that solves the problem, but hear me out:

These bots ruin the experience on Lemmy for new users. They spam so many posts, attempting to block them from a mobile app will usually crash the app. If you’re a new user coming to Lemm.ee sorting by all, you see tons and tons of empty posts.

Zerobytes is particularly egregious because it doesn’t even repost actual content, just thousands and thousands of links to Reddit posts. It’s a spam instance, period, and I feel strongly about this.

Lemmit.online isn’t quite as bad, but it’s an entire instance dedicated to spam reposting everything from Reddit. All the posts have zero engagement, and the comment value is gone so everything decent gets buried.

Yes there are ways around this on an individual user level, but then you’re creating a context where there’s even less engagement in the vast majority of “new” posts.

Anyway, thems my thoughts. Repost bots are stupid, one that drive traffic to Reddit are even worse. Thoughts?

  • Captain Aggravated
    4•8 months ago

    Assuming “opinions wanted” includes those from other instances, here’s a very sh.itjust.works take regarding those Reddit repost bots…

    • It might have a legitimate use as a way to read Reddit without visiting Reddit, as others have posted, on the other hand I struggle to see the value of posting questions but not answers from the likes of r/buildapc. It feels like it’s trying to funnel people to Reddit to see the full discussion, which I would classify as commercial advertisement.
    • This traffic is staying on its home instance, they’re not posting to our communities where they’re subject to our instance rules.
    • It’s not exactly one user in one community but it’s not everyone including the admins either; there’s other legitimate traffic happening there, so there may be other means available.

    On my home instance, this would require a proposal, discussion, and vote in the Agora; it doesn’t qualify for unilateral admin action. I suspect the vote would land Nay; I’ve seen and participated in a couple “Hey what’s up with those reposts from Reddit?” threads, but nothing came of it. So I think it’s below our threshold for action. Do with that what you will.