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

  • willya@lemmyf.uk
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    9 months ago

    You only federate (content/communites) with stuff that’s been subscribed to by your users or vice versa. Please don’t type out whole paragraphs of bullshit.

    Also if you want to read some stuff from the guy that created it instead of also saying random stuff about them:

    spoiler

    Q: This is spam, can you stop?

    A: First of all, I apologise for the inconvenience. All you have to do is block @bot@lemmit.online, and none of its posts will ever show up on your instance. If you you don’t want anyone else on your server to be exposed to this bot/instance, you should convince your admin to defederate from lemmit.online. Since there are no other users on here, there will be no harm done.

    Obviously I could stop, because running this server and software is only ever going to cost me time and money. But for the reasons listed above, I still think this server is a useful addition to the lemmyverse at this time. But I’m looking forward to the day where I can turn the bot off because it’s no longer needed.

    Q: What started this?

    A: Okay, nobody asked this, but I’m going to tell you anyway. After Reddit made it clear that they are effectively killing third-party apps and implementing plenty of other anti-end user decisions, I realized that I would either have to accept not being able to access my time-wasting content or have to do so in a rather uncomfortable way (either through the official app or old.reddit.com for as long as they’ll allow it to exist).

    Being a stubborn developer, naturally, I chose option C: Have my own Reddit. With blackjack, and hookers. This way, I would still be able to access my beloved content without being beholden to Reddit’s mood swings and abusive relationship tendencies.

    Besides that, I also know that Content is King. So I’m order to counter the network effect (No users because no content, No content because no users), I figured it would be better to have some inorganic content to bootstrap the adoption of Lemmy.

    • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      You only federate (content/communites) with stuff that’s been subscribed to by your users or vice versa.

      So at some point in July some newcomer from reddit thought it might be a good idea to subscribe to lemmit.online, and then they returned to reddit, and we’re stuck with this garbage in perpetuity?

      I did read the authors FAQ. It’s nonsensical.

      All you have to do is block @bot@lemmit.online

      That doesn’t help new users. As I mentioned in my comment. This spam discourages engagement from new users and gives the impression that lemmy is some kind of shitty version of reddit. I guarantee there are many new users who don’t understand why there are dozens of AITA posts from reddit with no comments.

      you should convince your admin to defederate from lemmit.online

      As I said in my comment, no one want’s to defederate because someone will complain that it’s censorship, which it is not in this case.

      This way, I would still be able to access my beloved content without being beholden to Reddit’s mood swings and abusive relationship tendencies.

      This is lunacy. He could have his own reddit without subjecting the rest of Lemmy to this spam. I sincerely doubt the guy is even using these posts himself - what’s the point of reading AITA questions without the comments?!

      Besides that, I also know that Content is King. […] I figured it would be better to have some inorganic content to bootstrap the adoption of Lemmy.

      It’s the opposite, these posts are making it look like Lemmy has no content.