Ok, imagine this, you are on reddit (say, a slow hobby focused subreddit), everybody there is nice and knowledgeable, and one day, the mods there announced that since there is not enough “content” on the sub, they are going to use a bot to repost content from 9gag in order to “bolster engagement” and “grow the community”.
How would you feel about that?
If you feel upset and grossed out, you’re exactly right.
I don’t think there is a single non-spam subreddit where that kind of behavior would be tolerated without being called out for blatant mod abuse. No community in the world would ever tolerate automated reposting from another website, not reddit, not 4chan, not any forums of any size, even 9gag, I repeat, BLOODY 9GAG, was tired of being called out for reddit reposting and started making original content.
So why exactly should this kind of behavior be tolerated here?
Now, I’m sure some mods here did it with good intentions, but again, the road to the hell that is modern reddit is PAVED with good intentions. Content for the sake of content is bad, and we already knew it is bad, which is why Gallowboob was so thoroughly disliked, he generates “”“”““content””“”“”, in other words, spam that drowns out the normal people who can’t compete with a professional marketer, much less a bot, which is exactly the reason why “Just block the bots” doesn’t work, because it ruins the genuine engagements on a forum by drawing people to the lowest common denominator of “”“”“”“”“”“content”“”“”“”“”“”“”.
Reddit, over the years, has turned into a platform for “bolstering engagement” for advertisers, and it does that by algorithmically stoking conflicts between people so they would endlessly argue and doomscroll. Why would we want that here? Now, I think most of us like the Lemmy/kbin right now because of the lack of bots here, and the conversations happen naturally and genuinely. I’ve even seen people here try to engage the bots, not realizing that they would never get a response out of them, because it felt normal to just talk about things.
(Eat your robot hearts out, @L4s and @BotIt)
Suppose then, if this repost bot situation was indeed temporary, why would people want to make original content if they are just going to be drowned out by bots? What’s to stop someone from turning on bots from /r/dankmemes or /r/tiktokcringe? The bots are not members of the community, because they are not people (save the /r/botsright joke for more appropriate times), and over time, we will just become dependent on the bots hosing us down directly from that burning dumpster fire and become doomscrolling addicts again.
That’s the number two lesson from the failure of Voat: that repost bots, like hate, should also not be tolerated, and Reddit will never die if we keep feeding it.
Everybody here are still currently all “Oh fuck reddit, fuck spez, I deleted my reddit account and all of my comments and will never go back again”, but after finally getting away from reddit, why are you so insistent on trying to turn this place back to the worst part of reddit again?
And if the reddit migration on July 1st does indeed occur, do you think they would be ecstatic to see a place that’s mostly reddit reposts, but with less “”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“content”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”? If they wanted reddit, why wouldn’t they just go back to reddit?
When will we finally be rid of reddit, if we are the ones keeping it on life support?
I will say, if I sound frustrated, it’s because I am frustrated, because I actually can’t believe I even had to say this. Judging from the comments on this thread yesterday, I think a majority of people here would agree with me. We have something good here, and I’d like to keep it that way a bit longer.
Now, I very much appreciate that our admins here at lemmy.world and their amazing job of preemptively blocking suspicious bot infested instances, so I’m asking politely for @ruud, @Antik and the rest of our good admin team here to put their foot down on not allowing reddit repost spambots and nip this problem in the bud before it takes root, so I can get back to shitposting in peace.
Be better than reddit.
Burn reddit down.
I’d say they need curation.
There’s thousands of posts getting botted over, but maybe five of those have useful content. Most of the time, the good stuff was in the comments. All that needs doing is a team going through what the bot posts and pruning the junk.
There have been some of those posts that were more than just links to a title on reddit. And there’s the image posts like from r/funny where (despite me thinking they’re dumb as hell) it is content that is forum neutral. So an outright no repost bots rule isn’t any more ideal than them having no restrictions at all.
Like, best of legal advice, as an example. Useless bot because all it does is link back to legal advice posts without any of the comments from BOLA these made the sub entertaining. Stuff like that can go and nobody is missing out. But, stuff like r/art, the value is in the posts, so blanket banning that is a loss.
This needs manual curation like r/goodlongposts used to have until reddit pissed off the human that was doing the curation. Curation works for aggregation and reposts.
I respectfully disagree. Curation is impossible with spam, since the moderators are the ones who currently sets up the spambots, and so they will turn a blind eye to it just so their community can grow. Allowing bot posts is too ripe for abuse, which is why I think the repost bots (again, not all bots) should be banned altogether with extreme prejudice.
There’s no reason that the good stuff should only be in the comments, I don’t want to end up in a situation where the only way to make things usable here is to block the biggest communities.