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.
Hi!
We actually had a talk about bots this week between admins and some mods!
There was a bot from Lemmy.online that did nothing but import Reddit threads to their instance and when we checked they imported nearly 40k threads from different subreddits. All these threads were posted into communities where the Lemmy.online bot was the only moderator. So that would mean there would be actually zero moderation there and it would ultimately fall on us as admins. So we blocked that bot and instance. We nipped that one right in the bud already!
We are still discussing in where to draw the line, ofcourse there are useful bots: I like those tldr-bots for example. But those should only be active in communities where they have been activated by the moderators.
As you probably noticed this week has already been a big one on the part of decision making and behind the scenes work trying to get this instance updated to 0.18.1 and such, so we didn’t finish talking about this amongst the LW team yet. So yes, feel free to express your thoughts on bots and how you feel this should be handled in this thread and you can be sure everything here will be considered!
Hi Antik! Appreciate you for listening to mine and many people here’s concerns. My thoughts on this is pretty clear, I don’t want bots here, but I will concede that the tl;dr bot is useful to others, even though I don’t personally use it, so it should stay where it’s needed.
However, having a bot running around reposting 5 articles a minute from reddit sets a very dangerous precedent for the quality and community here, and the moderators that set them up usually don’t even check what they are posting as they are automated feeds, they have comments calling the article out, but of course, there won’t be any response from a bot.
A lot of it is just ragebait from /r/politics and fearmongering bait from /r/technology. I just don’t want that feeling of awfulness here, and I think many would agree with me too.
The consensus so far was a bit like this: as long as the bot is in a channel that is actively moderated and not just spamming as you say “5 articles per minute”, then that would be ok. We’re still a bit unsure where to draw the line here, as I said we haven’t really finished that discussion yet - this week has already been quite eventful.
But even yesterday I received a report from a bot that reported a post from a user who simply said they were “having a shitty day” as “Toxic and Rude”. Those kind of bots will only give us more work with the false positives. So I reached out to the owner of that bot and told them we definitely didn’t want that kind of “help”.
My concern is that usually those bots are setup by the moderators of communities, such as @[email protected] or botit on WorldNews here, and, of course, if they are the ones that set it up, then they will not exert any oversight onto them.
(Again, I don’t think they did it with bad intentions, so don’t attack them please.)
I think that would just lead to what we disliked about reddit’s power mods in that they control the full content to push onto everyone, because they are faster.
Again, my stance on this is that Lemmy should be a place for human beings, and we should minimize the use of bots to what’s only necessary, there’s enough places on the internet for bots to post spam, so automated content repost, especially from reddit, needs to be stopped.
Thanks for blocking that instance.
I tried to explain to their admin why the entire concept was bad for the fediverse but they didn’t seem to understand.
People can do whatever they want with their instances, but something like that should defederate themselves and live in a void.
That isn’t the way to try and build content or community over here. We have the high ground. We don’t need to stoop down to their level.
That’s the heart of the problem for me. 40k posts with zero moderation is a problem.
There’s a bot I’ve been seeing these past couple of days that is constantly reposting posts with the title cut off in half. Like, it’d just cut it off mid sentence and replace the rest with three dots. I think it’s called @[email protected]
Fwiw, I suggested curation ( in response to op) as a solution to the problems the repost bots bring. Human curation to control a bot works very well. I did it at r/goodlongposts for a few years until spez shit the bed over the API. Obviously, a bot like lemmy.online needs a full team to handle the flow, but there’s plenty of folks the would be willing to dip their toes into lemmy moderation like that, if only to learn the ropes for real moderation.
So, if you wanted to allow bot based reposting from reddit, pairing that with humans supervising would be a good option on a human driven instance like yours. Shit, I’d curate one just to contribute, and I’m kinda burnt on moderation overall.