this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy

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I feel like it just creates a potemkin village where we have communities filled with content that nobody interacts with or cares about.

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[–] [email protected] 158 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Scraping bots make lemmy seem like a cheap repost bothouse. I am here for actual human conversations!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

The only way that I think scraping bots are helpful would be for purely archivale purposes. I wish someone would create an Instance that scrapes old Reddit posts and information and posts that information solely on that instance. Scraping new content and posting it here to Lemmy is not even using Lemmy, we've just gone back to Reddit at that point.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I’ve started to block anyone who I see just spamming mediocre articles into multiple communities.

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

Hello fellow human, let's have a conversation

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

For sure, let's talk it up, homie. What's the word on the street?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you heard of the recent gravity wave (GW) announcement? They've found a GW analog to the cosmic microwave background. I've been wondering, when we can detect these waves well enough, we might see the imprints of alien spaceships going FTL, zipping across the stars. Or we might just see really cool colliding stars and black hole mergers. Either way, the waves are apparently a little louder than expected.

Anyway, that's my attempt at conversation. What's going down your side of town?

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

Yo, what up? The GW announcement sounds mad cool. I dig space and all that jazz. Aliens would be dope if we found them. Could we get their technology though? Could we communicate with them? That would be a whole new level my man. I think we still got some ways to go to detect those alien space ships, but maybe one day.

As for what's poppin around these parts, lemme tell you what's going on in my neighborhood. So the other day, I was at the park with some friends, and we saw a group of guys playing basketball. One of them went up for a dunk and totally missed the hoop. It was hilarious, bro! We all started laughing and giving him a hard time about it, but then he got all serious and challenged us to a game. We were all like, "no way, bro, we're just out here trying to have fun." But he was persistent, and we ended up playing against him and his friends. We got whipped, but it was all in good fun.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, they are garbage. I block every single one I come across. Else Lemmy is nothing but an echo chamber.

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

There is a block bots setting in the user settings as well, although it may also block useful ones.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago

Many of them just link back to reddit, no idea what's useful about that

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Hate 'em and immediately disabled the option to view bot posts

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

as long as the amount of scraping is very limited, e.g. copying the top 3 posts of a subreddit daily, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal πŸ€”

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I could arguably see sharing a few choice posts each day, but it seems like it's always posts that have no votes or comments or interactions

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

All I want is an nsfw scraping bot. Only reason I still open Reddit. Lemmy's NSFW content is lacking

All the other bots that I see from lemm.it are useless imo

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I have already contributed my two cents on this before the exodus. If you tolerate these types of low effort bots here, you will kill the platform.

Nobody wants that shit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

There’s a PCMR one I don’t mind because it just results in images of peoples builds in my feed. Another bot I appreciate is a HN bot over on derp.foo - mildly useful to have this stuff collected over here like it’s an RSS feed.

In short - they’re ok in sparing doses

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Lemmy should not try to be a carbon copy of a 20 year-old VC-funded for-profit site with hundreds of millions of users. Lemmy should establish its own identity and play to its strengths.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Depends on the posting frequency… some just fill up my feed, and I had to block them to see a better variety of content

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

It's a great question. I am missing certain content from the niche sub-reddits and trying hard not to fall back to Reddit.

Some of this 'reposting' will help the community to add comments/interaction but as you mention may turn this platform into a leech.

Either way people implementing Bots helps the moderation teams to some extent.

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

I find them useless because you often lose the necessary title and post text that accompanied the image, plus you always lose the relevant discussion. This last bit is almost always the most engaging part of the post.

I suppose they could be useful in adult communities, or for memes and shitposting where titles and text are either redundant or useless.

All in all, I say we get rid of them.

[–] freamon 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It depends on the bot. That one on lemmit online is as dumb as rocks. The Boycott Reddit Bot is doing a decent-enough job of generating posts that people reply to.

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

But that bot posts to regular communities on e. g. lemmy.world and kbin.social what isn't really desirable imo. I prefer the way lemmit.online goes, which is keeping it all on a specific instance

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

I was following a few just to keep up with what cool things people were making. I think I unfollowed them now because reddit posts more often than lemmy and these dominated my feed and I still had no one to talk to about the post.

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

Makes me wish there was a site-wide feature to block instances.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Semi related: I almost wish we were archiving Reddit posts with Lemmy, so we could find our answers here. Like this? the people in the comments haven't found all of the resume settings, I think. They're kind of spread out. I'd suggest to keep looking. I just accomplished this task, but I'm not logging into that website. Need an /c/[email protected] lol. Directly bring value to redditors in interacting with lemmy. Hey bro we answered your question here take a look ->

Only thing that leaves me worrying is longevity of hosting service. I used that thing for twelve years. This whole time the servers haven't lost track of my data. How long will these servers last?