this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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I've been seeing a lot of users from alien.top commenting in various threads (mainly sports) lately. They only caught my attention because they are all flagged as bots and I typically manually block most bots (not all because there are some I like). For every one of them their entire post history consists of 1-2 comments or posts. When I took a look at that instance there is nothing there at all and it also shows no users. The comments look human enough but I guess I wouldn't be surprised to learn that all the comments are LLM generated. Is alien.top just someones LLM experiment or is something else going on here?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The bots are only posting to communities that have explicit approval from the mods. Are you subscribing to any of those communities or is your complaint because it is showing in your "all" feed?

Edit: Instead of downvoting, please explain what is your problem with it. I will be a lot more likely to make changes if there is reasonable feedback.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

These bots go against the Lemmy World rules on bots. Yes they need the approval from the moderator but they can not just import unmoderated content from reddit.

https://lemmy.world/post/1860512

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

unmoderated content from reddit.

What if the content is moderated?

The tool I'm working on also was designed to only mirror content that is reviewed by the service administrator. They will still show up as bots, but the messages will only go through after a human has reviewed the content. It also can define what sets of posts should/should not be mirrored (e.g, no NSFW, no post from actual reddit bots, no stickied comments, self-posts or link posts only, etc)

Would that be okay?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well I guess our problem with it is that we don't want a bot clogging up our feeds with content from Reddit and we would prefer if you shut it down.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Please, don't use the Royal We to make your argument. For every person complaining about the bots, I have two people asking for it and telling me that they are glad they can access content from the niche communities without having to access reddit.

Anyway, your beloved leaders at LW already defederated from alien.top, so there is nothing you have to worry about. Enjoy your sheltered life.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For everyone complaining about bots you have two that come and tell you that they are glad? I highly doubt it seeing the activity in those communities. You're not the first one to do this reddit botspam, and our actions against these have been very consistent.

You can look that up here: https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world

You create a bot that goes against our publicly-available policy and then you get mad we don't want to change that policy for you. These rules about bots were put in place because our users requested it. And we are far from the only instance with that policy. Try to do the same on lemm.ee

Our announcement on the bot rules: https://lemmy.world/post/1860512 Another thread on Reddit repost bots: https://lemmy.world/post/4844752

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am not mad. I am just saying that the tool is meant to do more than being just a mirroring bot. At the moment, it is creating bots, but eventually there will be a percentage of those who will be real users.