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
Hate repost bots, if you want to use one as a back-er-up-er-er it should post to a dedicated community intended to be an archive, not the main communities for a topic, they are practically spam and don’t promote any conversation in the comments as people avoid commenting on something that has zero connection to the original poster of the question.
a dedicated community intended to be an archive
That’s the intention of lemmit.online, but it leaks. It should just be a stand alone instance not federated to anywhere else.
Disagree. If it’s tagged as a bot account, you can ignore it. You can block the community, instance, individual bots.
While I don’t like them, other people do. This isn’t a community where staffers currate, it’s a place of free federation. By joining Lemmy you agree to use your time to curate your own content.
Sure. Only this is not content - it’s just spam.
I find it very hard to believe there’s a single user that finds any value in reposting /r/AITA posts. Without the comments the questions have no value as content.
Interesting timing with this making All yesterday. https://lemm.ee/post/10568520
That’s not an /r/AITA post.
Additionally, you’ll notice that the post that hit all is a cross post from an actual user. The original post from the bot has no upvotes and no comments.
IMO, this is really just evidence that the bot is counter productive.
Oh good catch, and point.
I 100% agree, for me. But while I find it hard to believe, some people may want it. They may run their own instance and subscribe to archive the content. They may just like to read it. I have no idea how crazy people are. All that being said, I’m in favor or separate archive communities.
There’s a tech news bot that regularly gets a lot of community engagement, so blocking all bot accounts would also block part of the good stuff.
You can block the community, instance, individual bots.
You actually can’t block instances. Blocking individual communities and bots when there are so many is terrible UX.
Well I didn’t see the option when I looked just now.
Edit: nvm found it
Repost bots are universally dogshit and should be forbidden.
News reposts can add value.
Absolutely Fucking not, full stop. Not indiscriminately spamming everything posted on Reddit with no user interaction, it makes the fediverse look dead
If you wanna repost shit that’s fine, but not 10k posts at a fucking time
Hard disagree. You’re going to get more engagement if there are posts to discuss. News was one of the main reasons I was on reddit, and the reposts here are a big part of why I don’t visit reddit at all anymore. Sure I want to discuss the news and wish there were more commenters in each post, but at least the news is still showing up here. News without much conversation beats no news at all.
Go check out the average comment count on a post from Lemmit.online
I’ll wait.
Manual posts are fine. Not bot posts. If I wanted to see every news article, I’d just go to a news site or use an RSS reader. Not every news article needs commentary, and not every news article is interesting enough to warrant being posted here.
Reddit has a pro-NATO Nazi supporting bias, so such repost bots should be disallowed.
Lol
If the content feed is what’s valuable and can be reposted to Lemmy, it gives people one less reason to stay on Reddit.
No it doesn’t. Comments and engagement are what drives communities and the bots kill that. Someone pops in from Reddit, sees nothing but shit from Reddit? They’re gonna go back to Reddit. It’s fucking asinine.
This, 100%. I’d rather see 10 posts with a bunch of comments than 150 posts with no comments.
I can get news anywhere.
Especially with the frequency that these repost bots post, it’s just drowns out real posts and makes lemmy look like a bot farm.
Repost pots are kinda my personal hatred on Lemmy, my block list is ridiculous
Can’t wait for instance blocking so zerobyte or whatever the repost instance is called can be removed from my life forever.
Zerobyte and Lemmit
For what it’s worth, many apps like Boost and Sync can do this locally.
Oooo that’s certainly a handy feature.
You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you seem to be assigning your opinion to me as well.
I didn’t leave reddit because the content was bad. I left because they stopped supporting mobile apps. That seems to be why most people left to be honest.
Lemmy is my one stop shop for news and social media. If there were not news stories being reposted from Reddit then Lemmy would not be a suitable reddit replacement.
No one is assigning their opinion to you. We each have our own competing opinions which we are advocating for.
If you stop the bots, actual people will start posting actual content like an actual community.
AITA is one of the worst karmafarming subs to exist on Reddit. 4chan is more reliably truthful than that place.
Yeah not a fan of it for all of the reasons you stated.
I blocked the bot. No engagement with the AITH OP, which was half the fun
Yeah I feel like these kinds of bots only make sense where what’s valuable is the content feed (like r/EarthPorn), which can be stolen and put on Lemmy, and not the discussion, which gets lost.
I don’t even like the AITA subreddit. It’s precisely that kind of validation that annoys me the most of a social community. In the case of /r/AITA, it’s just so “on your face”. People rarely will tell the truth about their topics, even when they do, why go so harsh about themselves? Why not ask “Am I wrong here?”, "Am I committing a mistake?, “Will I regret this?” instead of a “Am I the asshole?”. Don’t you think very self-entitled people will come and tell you “fuck yes! YATA”?
Ah, anyway, no, bots that can crosspost from other communities shouldn’t be allowed. We also shouldn’t try to replicate every successful/popular community, especially if it’s a toxic one.
I think that that bot might actually be preventing the AITA community from growing. Yeah, it’s easy enough to block the bot. I don’t disagree with that at all.
The majority of new users may look at the community and see nothing but bot posts. I don’t know about you, but if all I see on a community are bot posts, I tend to skip that community. I don’t always care to go digging through numerous posts to see if it’s worth it to block a bot. Doubly so, if there is so much bot posting that the normal posts are practically hidden. A new user may just assume that the community is intended for bots and just skip it altogether.
I don’t care about AITA anymore to be honest, but too many bot posts can definitely hinder the growth of a community. I think that would be true for many communities.
Imo, it’s a touch worse when the community is based on personal stories. No one will really benefit from voting/discussing. Instead, you’re reading posts that someone else intended for another group on another website. There isn’t really a lot of “community” that you can get with that. Short story readers group, I guess? The actual OP certainly won’t get any of the input.
I can’t say it better!
Why repost the content here if you’ll never reach the poster?
Not for AITA, but I once wrote a long emotional response to a relationship reddit repost without realizing it what it really was. Only after hitting send did I finally see. It really sucked because I thought I was helping the OP with some advice and comfort and felt like a huge idiot afterwards.
So, yea… there’s no real value in reposting these kinds of messages if you can’t even reach out to the OP. And it just feels kind of scummy to be discussing these kinds of issues without the OP even being able to read along.The bot should really be bidirectional. Like message the Reddit OP if there are replies here / respond to the original thread. But I don’t think Reddit would allow that
No. The bot shouldn’t exist.
No, reddit should be reddit and lemmy should be lemmy.
Lemmy should be Lemmy
Man you’re missing the entire point of federation. The whole idea is it’s not just one site.
The whole idea is that there’s no single point of control.
The whole idea does not include dumping spam from whatever other sites on lemmy. No one is interacting with this crap.
Not if they found out
I encourage stealing from these communities: aww, askhistorians
I discourage stealing from: any of the innumerable fake story subreddits.
I’m not a fan of reposting AITA content. The fun is in the comments, which you don’t get here.
In a word, asinine.
Who thought this would be a good idea? I also find the tendency of making shoddy subReddit replicas is bankrupt and devoid of imagination. It’s like when the British pilgrims voyaged for weeks across the Atlantic into uncharted territory, only to found their new towns with the same fucking name as the place they just left.
I mostly agree with you, but Reddit has such unique and niche ideas that it’s kinda hard not to use them.
You could probably just make a bot to generate AITA stories, they would be the same quality
Let’s give it a shot. From GPT-4:
Hey, Reddit, I need your judgment on a bizarre situation that happened last night. So, my buddies and I were having a late-night bonfire in my backyard, sharing some beers and good laughs. It was a typical evening until the unthinkable happened.
Out of nowhere, blinding lights appeared in the sky, and we all saw this massive UFO hovering above us. We were absolutely terrified, frozen in shock. Then, these weird, short creatures with big heads and huge eyes emerged from the spacecraft.
Here’s where the controversy comes in: While my friends were panicking and trying to hide, I somehow mustered the courage to approach the aliens. They communicated with me telepathically and said they wanted to take me on board their ship to learn about human culture.
Without consulting my friends, I decided to go with them! I mean, how often do you get the chance to represent all of humanity to extraterrestrial beings, right? So, I went on board, and we had some kind of intergalactic cultural exchange.
Fast forward to this morning, they brought me back to my backyard, and my friends were furious with me. They said I abandoned them and left them to deal with the aliens alone. They claim they had a terrifying ordeal while I was up there having some sort of alien tea party.
So, Reddit, AITA for leaving my friends behind during this bizarre alien abduction? Did I prioritize my own curiosity over their safety? Or should I be forgiven because, well, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?
TL;DR: I left my terrified friends to have an intergalactic cultural exchange with aliens during an abduction. They’re angry, but I thought it was a unique opportunity. AITA?
I agree, I think it does more harm than good.
A repost bot could provide some value if it’s reposting say news articles or sports scores. Even then you would need to find a way to make sure the posts have some value and are not just spam. However if the purpose of the post was to provide some sort of advice to the OP, the repost is worthless.
I blocked that whole community because of that bot. I kind of get the impulse, but it’s swamping any attempt at useful discourse with layers of shit.
