There are two that immediately spring to mind, zerobytes.monster’s b0t user, and lemmit.online
Now here at lemm.ee we generally don’t defend from stuff, that’s actually why I prefer this instance. Yes, you can block the bot users and that solves the problem, but hear me out:
These bots ruin the experience on Lemmy for new users. They spam so many posts, attempting to block them from a mobile app will usually crash the app.
Zerobytes is particularly egregious because it doesn’t even repost actual content, just thousands and thousands of links to Reddit posts. It’s a spam instance, period, and I feel strongly about this.
Lemmit.online isn’t quite as bad, but it’s an entire instance dedicated to spam reposting everything from Reddit. All the posts have zero engagement, and the comment value is gone so everything decent gets buried.
Yes there are ways around this on an individual user level, but then you’re creating a context where there’s even less engagement in the vast majority of “new” posts.
Anyway, thems my thoughts. Repost bots are stupid, one that drive traffic to Reddit are even worse. Thoughts?
sunaurus@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Thanks for posting this, OP.
I have heard this negative feedback regarding the repost instances many times from several users, and conversely, I have not heard any positive feedback about those instances at all.
At the moment, my perception is that these instances universally disliked here, and as they are objectively having a negative effect on lemm.ee through effectively creating a ton of spam without any real discussion, perhaps we should indeed consider defederating. I would really appreciate if people who actually enjoy content from those instances could share their thoughts here!
cerevant@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Perhaps it would be useful to look at the subscriber numbers for these communities? Maybe contact some of those subscribers directly, since they are the ones who requested the content in the first place? I would venture that people interested in a non-interactive firehose of links is probably a lurker and wouldn’t respond here.
If a lot of these communities have one subscriber, It could be that someone subscribed just to get the community on All.
I’m generally of the view that defederation to curate content is a bad idea. I’ve seen suggestions to have the ability for an instance to exclude certain communities from All, or maybe Lemmy needs a semi curated Popular feed like Reddit.
cubedsteaks@lemmy.today 1 year ago
I know I accidentally subbed to some when I was looking for communities to add to my feed. I need to go through and remove them now that I know what they are.
TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Thanks for boosting the discussion, I’m curious to see if anyone enjoys these bots as well. Thanks for all your efforts 🙏
jordanlund@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Well that’s the trick, isn’t it? They don’t engage with the bot posts, if they were enjoying them then wouldn’t they engage?
megane_kun@lemm.ee 1 year ago
One counterpoint is that these bots offer a way to “browse Reddit content” without giving Reddit anything. And if browsing posts is the only thing one is after, one could enjoy the content but not interact with it, not even an upvote nor a subscription (to the repost community).
However, I don’t know of any way of measuring such interactions other than people telling us that they do.
Personally speaking though, the best, or worst, or perhaps spiciest part of reddit posts are in the comments. Just the post, without the comments providing the meat of it to me is kinda empty.
I’m fine either way since I rarely, if ever, encounter such Reddit reposts from bots. I’ve never subscribed to such, and I almost never encounter them in the wilds of “All.”
Kalcifer@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I would vote nay for defederating from them. While I personally found their content annoying, someone else may actually find it uesful. I blocked the users, and the problem was solved. This issue may arise again, however, if more spam users pop up on these instances than a single user could be expected to realistically deal with. This could possibly again be fixed by the user blocking the instance, but this would have to wait for user-blocking of instances to be implemented.
HelloHotel@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Im generally on the side of reposting for archival and continuation. however, the transparency and half-assed ness and lack of transparency of these services make it a no deal. If I were to remake one (and ive thoght about it) a simple “upload and done” approach is awful