Ask Lemmy

You are not the asshole. The purpose of that community is to have communication with humans. When a bot posts a question there, there is no reason to respond. It's not a human asking, and the human that originally asked in another forum will never see the response. I blocked that spammy bot, and have enjoyed my feed way better since.

Plus who are you helping? AITA is about engagement with the person involved.

Helping someone not be an asshole, or reassuring them that they aren't.

I don't see the benefit of reassuring a bot 🙃

NTA.

AITA is not about sharting funny content and then asking "am I an asshole or what", it's a way for the OP to invite (hopefully) honest and civilized discussion and criticism about their actions, without risking verbal abuse or being downvoted to hell. When a bot reposts an existing question without the OP's knowledge, it loses the line of communication between OP and the community and the entire point of an AITA post. Populating the fediverse with content is important, but compromising the entire reason that content exists is not the way to build a community.

edit: sharing, not sharting. I'm not changing it because funny.

You mean the [email protected] community? The entire lemmit.online instance is literally meant as a Reddit post archive, as you can read in the pinned post on the instance's main page.

You're not an asshole, but you're misinformed and failed to do your research.

A bit off-topic, but AITA is a community I don't mind if it stays on Reddit.

It's either fake stories, people looking for approval, people who don't mind their own lives, or arm-chair psychologists taking guesses.

Hi. Lemmit developer/owner here.

You are not the asshole. As you are quite aware by now, the whole point of the bot/Lemmy server is to copy content from Reddit. I know the bot can be quite spammy, and I have no idea why people Request subreddits like these, let alone subscribe to them - since it doesn't copy any comments, even when it EXPLICITLY states so in every post.

When I created the bot, I did so specifically for subs where interaction with OP and other community members is of little value, like [email protected] , [email protected] and, errr, "grown up subreddits".

That so many people subscribe to "cliffhanger subs" (just the questions without the answers) is beyond me, but it's a side-effect of the model / open market, I suppose. I do intend to keep improving the bot though. Short term plans are for adding some thresholds of minimum karma levels before archiving a post, and putting a sticky on each community that suggests actual, organic communities rather than this.

My end goal for Lemmit is for it to be unnecessary - that all the content people love is created here. But I do know it's hard to let go of some of the content treasures people leave behind.

Last but not least: I sincerely encourage everybody who dislikes the bot to block it, or to ask their server owners to defederate from lemmit.online if they dislike it. That's the beauty of the fediverse, in my opinion.

I block every community that bot posts in. I don’t want to see endless posts with zero discussion or engagement from anyone. It’s just noise to me.

If you were truly loyal to Lemmy and not going back all the time like a sucker, you wouldn’t even know, so yes, YTA.

/s

But seriously, if you were to try to fertilize land that is desert, you would have to plant millions and millions of plants and babysit them because they wouldn’t survive on their own yet, before the ecosystem changes and becomes relatively self-sufficient. So I think copying and crossposting is a legit way to boost the community, at least for now.

I suppose I should specify that this is from the lemmit.online server. Now I’m wondering if the entire server only exists to copy Reddit content… in which case, there’s a little egg on my face.

However, I still think that it’s lame. It also underscores some issues with lemmi, in that it has more subscribers and appears to be more popular than some actual communities that you can engage with. I’m sure I’m not the only one who subscribed without realizing what exactly it was…

Alright, done ranting. Carry on! 😊

I can see both sides of it. Sometimes, you just need a little activity to get stuff going. Otherwise, newcomers coming and seeing empty posts can turn them away

But in this case specifically (mods can only post and it's all copy-paste from Reddit), I'd block them too

NTA, that shouldn't rob your sleep tho, it's something that will happen, and kind of inevitable once reaching critical mass.

Despite that, I think there is nothing wrong with wanting to migrate useful content from dedicated communities into a safer, better platform. If you think about it, that content was never Reddit's, It was from the community, for the community.

People reposting low effort content and memes for engagement kinda suck tho.

I blocked the bot. It's artificial

NTA.

Here's my rageposting about it a couple of days ago. https://lemmy.world/post/805180, there's a link to a previous discussion as well.

And the admins have responded they had a talk with moderators and bots should not post without explicit moderator approval inside a community at this point, but I think they are being careful and keeping a close eye on this situation.

Oh also if it is only lemmit.online, then it's intended to be a bot only instance to scrape reddit. Admins on lemmyworld have already decided to block it, so maybe talk to your admin about it?

The bot did annoy me, so I just blocked it and carried on. I block other stuff I'm not interested in, so it's nothing personal.

I think a better idea to populate this page with content AND encourage discussion would be a "Best Of" style community. Don't just blindly copy everything over, but curate the best and encourage discussion around those.

Of course that would take work and I'm not doing that.

I always suspected a majority of posts in AITA the sub were fiction (either human made or AI). So anything to get away from that I'm all for.

I just switched to Lemmy yesterday, and I tried finding most of the communities I followed on reddit here. Since then, I've slowly realized that some of these communities rely on this automated bot that just dumps reddit content there.

I can appreciate the effort of populating these communities, but I found it irritating most of the time, since this is content that I can not genuinely interact with, only consume.

So, I don't think you're at fault here.

The worst part of Reddit was all the karma farming repost bots. Let’s keep it a Reddit thing.

No. I see a lot of reposts in here, even with meme templates 13 years old, and I’d rather not see them at all

I think ITA for being the only one here that dislikes AITA period. That shit subreddit should never have migrated here. It’s just karma farming.

majority of /r/AITA is fake,

Why would anyone want bot/fake posts flooding this place?

NTA. I agree this is obnoxious and counterproductive. If there's an actual need for an AITA comm on lemmy then it should be able to grow organically.

There's literally no one tell they're the ass hole.

I don't think any of those people are real anyway so whatever.

I blocked the lemmit bot a week or so ago. Smooth sailing (:

what's the point of copying over stuff from reddit here? If anything, why not make a separate community for that? If it's to archive it would be better to put it elsewhere dedicated to that.