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

  • Faceman🇦🇺English
    143•9 months ago

    Hate repost bots, if you want to use one as a back-er-up-er-er it should post to a dedicated community intended to be an archive, not the main communities for a topic, they are practically spam and don’t promote any conversation in the comments as people avoid commenting on something that has zero connection to the original poster of the question.

    • @[email protected]English
      11•9 months ago

      a dedicated community intended to be an archive

      That’s the intention of lemmit.online, but it leaks. It should just be a stand alone instance not federated to anywhere else.

      • fmstratEnglish
        8•9 months ago

        Disagree. If it’s tagged as a bot account, you can ignore it. You can block the community, instance, individual bots.

        While I don’t like them, other people do. This isn’t a community where staffers currate, it’s a place of free federation. By joining Lemmy you agree to use your time to curate your own content.

        • @[email protected]English
          5•9 months ago

          Sure. Only this is not content - it’s just spam.

          I find it very hard to believe there’s a single user that finds any value in reposting /r/AITA posts. Without the comments the questions have no value as content.

            • @[email protected]English
              1•9 months ago

              That’s not an /r/AITA post.

              Additionally, you’ll notice that the post that hit all is a cross post from an actual user. The original post from the bot has no upvotes and no comments.

              IMO, this is really just evidence that the bot is counter productive.

          • fmstratEnglish
            1•9 months ago

            I 100% agree, for me. But while I find it hard to believe, some people may want it. They may run their own instance and subscribe to archive the content. They may just like to read it. I have no idea how crazy people are. All that being said, I’m in favor or separate archive communities.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•9 months ago

          There’s a tech news bot that regularly gets a lot of community engagement, so blocking all bot accounts would also block part of the good stuff.