reddit bot spam is annoying

It consistently gets highly upvoted.

Definitely not. It’s one thing if the posters add context where necessary and are active in the comments (e.g. PugJesus on history memes), but there are tons of accounts that don’t interact with the comments at all and just spam posts. I think in a lot of communities, they actually crowd out the posters with OC or that would at least stay around to talk about their post.

Also, a lot of these accounts are clearly using some kind of automation for their posts, but can’t be arsed to space out their posts over time so it’s not just 10 of their posts one after the other on All.

lemmy.today/post/59276278

Nope. Everyone hates it.

Everyone upvotes it too.

People eat McDonald’s. Doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

I often upvote a couple of posts before I identify a poster as a spammer and block them. Even if the quality of their posts is fine when considered without context, comment sections and actual original content are much more important than reposted memes and spamposting stifles those.

Honestly, I think there is a quite large set of people who actually like the content. The guy has a point, if it’s highly upvoted on Reddit there was a lot of people who enjoyed the post.

There is also a very loud portion of people who absolutely hates it, (and I can agree that it’s a bit weird to repost content that relates to someone’s personal experience), but I think it’s actually a vocal minority. Perhaps a minority that is overrepresented in the Fediverse meta communities.

Of course it would be awesome and the best if most of the content on the Fediverse was original, but I would be concerned that it’s actually would become too much of a ghost town if the small number of accounts that post a shit ton of content would leave.

I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it was labeled at a bot post so I can filter it out easily but to constantly create new accounts spamming the content is annoying as shit.

Important point.

“Posted by bot” is a whole different issue from “Posting Reddit/X/FB”

Both moral and social issues worthy of discussion… but that should be considered entirely separately.

Even if it was posted by a human if the account is doing nothing but reposting content does it matter though?

My biggest problem is the reposters aren’t sticking around to actively be part of each discussion. They want to be the hero bringing the content without helping make better discussions

Reposting linked content from, yes. To? No. If you still brave those wilds to find content currently lacking on fedi and post here to drive engagement. You’re exactly the type of person the feddi needs. If you’re posting links to external comment sections about said links. You aren’t helping the feddi.

It’s worst with mastodon where there are a ton of not reporters that might be mistaken for actual outlets.

There’s a way to do it, and there’s a way not to do it. If you’re reposting something that directly solicits feedback and you don’t know enough to be able to respond, that’s no fun. If you’re looking over reddit, carefully selecting interesting content, and hosting good conversation about it, that’s very healthy. Given you’re using words like “large scale” and “direct,” I assume you mostly have the unhealthy kind in mind.

I do because there’s a bunch of accounts that are posting a ton of posts a day straight from Reddit.

Like three hundred a day.

I struggle to imagine a way one could create 300 posts per day that would be healthy.

How often do the cm0002 accounts post? There’s a lot, but at least they’re relevant to the communities.

I think I crosspost from .ml anywhere from 70-100 a day, maybe 150 on particularly busy days

But that includes a bulk front load of the overnight posts when I wake up that’s about ~20-40 posts

It honestly just fills the “micro breaks” void that was left behind when I stopped vaping a few years ago

For my .ml crossposting campaign I hit usually 70-100/day with maybe upwards of 150 on busy days, all just notifications from their rss feed.

It just fills the “micro breaks” void that got left behind when I quit vaping. It only takes me like 15/20 seconds per post for most of them. Some do need special handling but that doesn’t add that much

Yes exactly this. When you post something you should be ready to engage with the comments

Hello I am engaging with your comment

OP noticed me!

YSK that I’ve tagged all those accounts as bots on piefed.social.

Unlike on Lemmy, on PieFed people can choose to still see bot-generated posts but have them semi-transparent which makes them easy to scroll past OR interact with if you want. As well as the Lemmy option of just filtering them out entirely.

e.g. like this example:

I’ve also been thinking that a binary “this is a bot” or “this is human” flag is too limited and we need a third option - “this is a reposter” and people could choose to make-transparent, filter out or show their posts independently of the bot-or-not setting.

I suggest that you set the number at which someone gets tagged “a reposter” kinda high. Like, I post niche memes at least 2-3 times a week, but I try to pick good ones and add context if they’re obscure. But I also post weekly watch party announcements, and it’d suck if those all got graybanned.

Also… Are YouTube and Bandcamp links considered reposts? Because most music communities are made up of people posting links to songs they like.

(p.s. I’m not hating… I’m a big fan of piefed!)

2-3 times a week is nothing. 2-3 per day is completely fine.

It would only be used for the most flagrant accounts, ones with some level of automation - dozens of posts per day with almost no comments. That sort of thing.

I too find content on other networks (mostly Mastodon, occasional YouTube) and post them here. Often a few per day. But it’s all completely manual and I usually rewrite the description, add hashtags, etc. And I’ll interact with people who comment on the posts. Cross-pollination of content is normal and good.

There’s a point though, usually enabled by using some extra software tools like the one above, where someone ends up flooding their target communities, not responding to comments on the posts, looking inauthentic when they repost OC which plainly isn’t theirs and causing extra moderation work because their content is in the wrong places. Sanitation is the most obvious example of this but there are others.

Despite this, a lot of people upvote and comment on their posts. I don’t know if

1. they’re even aware of who the author is. Most apps do not emphasise this strongly so it’s easy to miss.
2. if they are aware then are they aware that the author is ignoring them and won’t learn from the feedback they’re getting?

… Or if they don’t care. Maybe they’re just content with the conversation in the comments without the OPs involvement. That’s valid (although not the kind of conversation I personally want to be a part of).

It’s probably a combination of don’t know and don’t care. For those people, labelling sanitation et al as a bot would seem heavy-handed. That’s why I’m leaning towards creating an in-between state, for these kinds of centaur accounts.

Thanks for the clarification!

Automated --> bot. If they’re using a “share to Lemmy” button, that’s not automation. If they’re using a one click script, that’s automation and should be marked as a bot.

Not a bot btw

All I do lmao:

As you note elsewhere, these are often highly upvoted and honestly, the fediverse is so small that without those posts, I worry about how much content there would be. (We can cry that people need to post more original content until our lungs give out but…)

So, I’d say this is probably a fine tuning issue. We probably want people to choose if they want to filter out as much content from reddit as possible, bot content only, mass reddit posters etc.

There’s so much fake content being shown that people feel no need to make their own posts.

Nothing should be reposted from twitter, nazis are fertiliser, they serve no other purpose.

Unsure if this is already your point or not, but, my question is: at what level of automation does it cease to be “selectively raiding the mainstream” and turn into “importing/copying the mainstream wholesale”?

Great point. “Selectively” is a key word there. Gunderloy was a key figure in zine culture, and they were all about making new stuff DIY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factsheet_Five

I see it as follows:

There is a chance that if I post something from reddit / twitter / whatever, it gives room to talk about it to someone who would not otherwise have done it because those posts are there and not here (account blocked, deleted, shadowbanned, whatever).

So , to me, it largely depends on what is being reposted. Things like news, official service pages or software releases? Not really useful to mirror to the social networks, you could just link to the source (or a better one than nazi sites use). Cats? Beautiful! Linux? Absolutely! Antiworker life pro tips? Useful! Local stores that don’t have their own webpage but an Instagram instead? Eh, but OTOH how else, unless one of us is volunteering to host them one. Arts and crafts? Nice to have, but with the understanding that the OP won’t get to see our feedback; sometimes that’s fine, sometimes we want to talk about a thing and not to the thing.

Well, it’s pretty good to not have to go to Reddit to comment on a post. Similarly, I’m considering looking for a way to bridge some of the subreddits I made with their PieFed counterparts (or, preferrably, my instance counterparts when I make one) so that posts and comments from Reddit are automatically bridged over to fedi, and maybe vice versa as well.

I think Lemmy is not at a scale sufficient enough to produce enough original content. I’m okay with tasteful reposting.