I started working on a script that will take top post from subreddits to post then to corresponding c/ on lemmy with various accounts to give the impression of minimal activity.
The idea comes from a lemmy user etting saying they would never want to support reddit with lemmy content (or in general), and instead just taking the content from there and putting it on lemmy.
It feels like I’m just kinda sewing lemmy into the human centipede that is content filler. I can see why content does get reposted it’s entertaining and engaging and they propagate.
It does feel like a Pandora’s jar like I’m laying a foundation for a bot army even though I only plan to be small scale
As long as you enable the ‘bot’ tag, so I can block it, it’s fine.
Lemmy needs to stop trying to copy Reddit; community names like Earthporn, Foodporn, F*ckCars etc. Voting is broken on Lemmy because it’s broken on Reddit.
The biggest thing Lemmy needs right now is commenters. We have more than enough news links with no comments.
well that may be true for general news but if you’re looking for a more specific topic it won’t necessarily hold.
I disagree with you since not all of this naming scheme should be used exclusively with reddit.
Some of us moved away from reddit because of enshitfication but we want the content and having the same names for communities is helpful to find relevant content in lemmy.
Isn‘t the Reddit front page full of reposted older threads by bots anyway? That repost bot would repost reposts of other bots then. I am not sure what this would accomplish other than turning Lemmy into yet another soulless content mill.
Build niches, plus people do like the content that get reposted
Something similar has been done before and it was really easy to spot. I won’t get into the details, but it was really trashy. There are other communities that try to copy Reddit already and I block most of them.
Communities driven by one persons posts or by a cluster of bots generally suck. Yes, communities must start with only one person, but if nobody else likes the idea and the community doesn’t drive participation from Lemmy as a whole, it’s simply noise.
Post content that you like, in communities that matter to you. If you like a particular strain of content, start a new community. People will join or they won’t. Read the room and continue driving the community, or don’t.
Automated posts have their place, but most people can spot it fairly quick. It generally doesn’t drive participation as much as organic posts.
Bluntly though, if you want Reddit content, go to Reddit. Lemmy isn’t Reddit and that is what people generally like about it.
if you want Reddit content, go to Reddit.
This makes zero sense. “Reddit content” is not exclusive to Reddit, and the people who came to Lemmy are not looking for alternative “content”, they are looking for an alternative, non-corporate controlled platform. Telling people to go to Reddit plays exactly to their game.
You are missing my point, but I also wasn’t clear enough. In proper context, we are saying the same thing.
I worded that sentence carefully, as to your point, I don’t actually want to tell people to go to Reddit. However, each platform is unique in its own way. If someone wants the Reddit experience, that is the only place they are going to find it. Reddit content is generally curated algorithmically while Lemmy content is not. It’s could be the same articles on the same day, but two different experiences.
OP was referring to reposting content for someone who seemed to be looking for the same volume of content that is on Reddit that is heavily sorted, unless I missed something. I was just saying that this platform doesn’t really support that kind of thing in a constructive way. The articles and the presentation combined make the platform “content”.
Maybe we are talking about the same thing, but I think we are talking about different parts of the elephant.
To me, the interesting part of Reddit was not in the popular communities, but in the tail end of niches. These simply do not exist in Lemmy, because we do not have the critical mass to sustain discussion about anything else other than politics, and this meta-conversation about Lemmy/Fediverse. To anyone looking for things in the long tail, Lemmy is void of content, so even if they wanted to move away from Reddit they would have no choice.
So, yeah, I agree that reposting about things that are popular in Reddit make no sense, but if we want to get rid of Reddit, then we will need to duplicate the volume of content they have in the niche communities to get over the chicken-and-egg problem.
I block any and all bots I see regardless of good intent, and suggest everyone else do the same. There’s enough living humans to post news articles and memes. We don’t need bot filler.
There’s enough living humans to post news articles and memes.
But there are not enough humans talking about interesting things that are only being discussed on Reddit.
Besides, “news articles and memes” are the least interesting thing to have in a discussion forum.
That seems like too much effort. Unless someone documents all the bots on lemmy
Just tag your bots as bots and the default “hide bot posts” option will do it automatically. But it requires the bot operators to properly tag their bot accounts as bots.
If people would stop making them, it’s would be zero effort. But sadly, this is where we are.
No thank you. Just leeching content from reddit will never get Lemmy anywhere.
I blocked all content reposted from Lemmy (there was an instance dedicated to that iirc).
First of all, posts without comments are pointless. Interaction and comments is what grows Lemmy. Second, bot posts are not well received by most here I think.
I can see it useful only as a “reddit backup” of kind, in case the platform goes offline for good and all that is lost.
I would worry for the level of moderation required to filter shitty / ai / bots etc.
Just leeching content from reddit will never get Lemmy anywhere.
I recently leeched some interesting post material from Reddit, shamelessly reposted it here, and it seemed to get lots of appreciation and a healthy amount of commentary.
I wasn’t acting as a bot, but does it matter? Most of the content’s probably not original to Reddit, anyway. Maybe using a bot in conjunction with hand-picking interesting material is a good idea, y’know?
We already have lemmit.online for scalping Reddit stuff.
Yeah I don’t plan to do it at that scale, but I will do it differently and “take account” or what gets posted and actually interact with people that react to what gets posted
And alien.top
That makes absolutely no sense, we have more than enough activity on lemmy without reddit trash. We don’t need a million posts a second we need a steady stream of high quality content made by real people.
we have more than enough activity on lemmy without reddit trash.
Only if you are talking about the stuff from the popular subreddit. I had 40+ subreddits I used to follow, none of the Lemmy counterparts see relevant activity.
Honestly adding spam to small communities only makes them worse, I like how on lemmy small communities are genuine and have a handful of real posters not bots spamming trash. We don’t need infinite content for every niche so you can scroll forever.
We don’t need infinite content for every niche so you can scroll forever.
Having critical mass in niche communities (like Reddit does) is not important because of “endless scrolling”, but because without it the Fediverse will always be seen a second-option. If the 90/9/1 rule is to be taken seriously, this means that 90% of the people browsing Reddit would have no issue to go to a mirror to lurk. If then half of these 90% are getting their posts from a mirror, the content creators will quickly realize that their audience is moving on another platform and start posting there.
ha, theres an entire instance dedicate to this process besides all the github bot scripts… this is nothing new here.
maybe make sure and throw the bot flag so people can filter accordingly
Yeah I see the ones for all the adult content. Man I’m bad at researching before I program.
I’m pretty much thinking about putting it in the description that they’re bots
There’s an explicit flag that can be toggled on every account to mark them as bots. If you’re acting in good faith that flag should definitely be toggled.
Ahhh, the other guy mad it sound like he blocked them as he found them, but it makes more sense if the account is marked
Automatic posting from Reddit has been tried before and has been pretty unpopular for the most part. Here’s an old thread with some good discussion about it:
Please don’t
Please let us have this forum without subjecting us to content from that other site.
Idk how to feel about this
When reddit first started, it almost failed because there was no content.
So what they did was had staff members post, and reply to each other. They made sure to reply to any actual new people. And then they did this from hundreds of automated accounts.
They simulated activity to promote actual real activity.
I know everyone will disagree with me, but I’d say DON’T flag them as bots. If the bots fool humans, and cause growth of the fediverse/lemmy? Great. In time you can turn off the bots. But only once actual humans are here.
I was thinking about putting my personal account on the script so that way I can get notifications and engage.
I like to think that lemmy users could just enjoy the content without having to go to reddit
The problem isn’t content, it’s engagement on the content. Folks complain that niche communities have no engagement, just a bunch of posts by a single person… but it feels like 95% of the time, if I comment on those posts, there’s no reply, not even from the OP, and that discourages further posting.
If you’re willing to engage on everything you post, I don’t see the harm in it, but at that point, why even use a bot? Why not just find content you like (or have the bot notify you of content), then post it yourself as an actual human?
Yeah I’m liking this idea of a script just cross posting for me on my personal accounts then I can just react to comments that come from it. I would get surprised by whatever gets posted too.
Plus reddit does filter content. Seems fun to me
FYI, there’s many bot accounts already reposting stuff. There was an entire instance previously dedicated to it, though I think it shut down at some point. It was not popular, most people blocked the accounts / instances and they just clogged up the feed for newcomers due to the lack of engagement.
