Hi,

I don’t post this to be malicious or rude, but simply out of concern.

I believe this bot is killing community growth on Lemmy. I keep coming across would-be-interesting communities only to find a wall of bot posts with zero comments, zero votes, zero engagement. And I walk away disappointed instead of getting into a new community. As, I’m sure, may other users are doing.

Sure, you say, “just block the bot” if I don’t like it. But that doesn’t stop this thing from stifling any real engagement and growth in communities. Surely if someone can “just…”, you can “just” go back to reddit if you want to read reddit content that badly.

I admire the engineering you put into making this thing work. It’s impressive, and honestly very cool. But I really think it’s actively disengaging users, when Lemmy has enough of a hurdle to overcome in growing new communities.

Thats just my 2 cents. I’m not sure it will mean much, but I felt I had to share it. Again, no ill intent against what you’ve accomplished in creating this. Best wishes.

  • Halosheep@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    I can agree with this. I found it discouraging to see interesting posts only to find it was from the bot with no interaction.

    I do not regret blocking the bot. It actually increased my enjoyment of lemmy.

  • Cagi@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    I have been thinking this for a long time. It’s like how paid fake followers on social media end up backfiring because they dilute the actual engagement content so much it ends up driving genuine engagement down.

    And it’s being used so badly! Reposting images and videos makes sense, but it’s stupid to repost people asking questions to a community. They aren’t asking us and they can’t hear our answers, it’s just wasting space. Huge swathes of untouchable content make up a huge percentage of the active and hot feeds.

  • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    I agree. The sheer number of bots and the … enthusiasm with their posting frequency is making the overall experience worse.

    I remember a discussion I was having on another site about what was happening with Twitter and Reddit, and there was a phrase that really stuck with me - “curation is the product.” I think many of us use a service like lemmy to find interesting things, ask questions, and have conversations. The mass auto posting of article after article makes discovery challenging. My All feed looks like a spam-filled inbox.

    And unfortunately block lists really don’t work. They’re tough to maintain, and they certainly don’t help new users find the communities that would make them stay.

    I really think the bots need to be banned or throttled.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    I entirely agree and I highly recommend that most instances generally ban bots like this.

    But I’m not against people running them on instances where it is specifically welcomed, and I think other instances shouldn’t defederate the instances that do - we should just ban the bots and/or the remove the communities that consist entirely of bot posts.

    This way, any users who want to use a lemmy client (or website) to read a combined view of the lemmyverse-at-large plus some scraped subset of reddit can just make an account on one of the servers that is doing that.

    Human users of those instances should be able to participate in the larger lemmyverse, even if the bots are banned from the rest.

    I don’t see it in the modlog now, but I think it was me that banned @bot@lemmit.online from lemmy.ml a few months ago, and I just banned a similar one @Dannebot@leddit.danmark.party today (and sent basically the above suggestion to the operator of it).

  • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    Completely agree. It’s just spam.

    Edit to add: maybe I’m just unnecessarily grouchy but I wish we could move away from the idea that lemmy is a replacement reddit. There are similarities but lemmys own culture needs to coalesce independently. Crosspoint from reddit perpetuates the misconception in the worst possible way.

    An extension of the above is the idea that defederation is the last, worst solution to any problem. It’s born of the idea that users should have one long- lived account that accesses everything which is in itself a redditism. Would it be so terrible if you needed multiple accounts to view instances which are not federated?

    lemmit.online is fine, what a great project, archive some reddit posts or something… but federating with it doesn’t provide any value to anyone.

  • Hanabie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    My block list is already as long as the LOTR trilogy, and its growth shows no signs of slowing down.

  • admin@lemmit.onlineMEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    Point taken and no offense taken. Hell, I’ve been thinking about this for some time myself as well.

    For now I have disabled the requesting of new subreddits/communities, and tightened the upvote filter to be at least 10 and have an 80% upvote ratio. It’s not much, but it should limit the amount unpopular posts somewhat.

    Next step is to go through the list of communities and purge all the “ghost communities” - ones that rely heavily on community participation, like for example AskReddit (221 subscribers). It’s going to be tricky to make that selection though. What to do, for example, with !AmItheAsshole@lemmit.online? With 1100 subscribers, it’s the most popular community on this server. Clearly people are getting something out of it, even though there are no replies to it.

    I guess I’ll have to figure something out.