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People want to see more happening here. The fediverse is not quite the ghost town it was a year ago, but it's still pretty quiet, especially once you start digging into hobbies.
Of course, the good solution is not bot-driven, but human-driven. But people are lazy and think that they'd rather repost thousands of posts with a bot than figure out what links they think are good and post those.
IF ITS TOO QUIET MAYBE WE SHOULD TYPE LOUDER?
Mechanical keyboard users unite!
I used to use a bot in one of my communities to help me out. Turns out it spammed way too much. Once I got feedback from the community I turned it off. I now have sources fed to me privately via RSS and then filter content based on what I think the community will enjoy and post it manually. Is it harder? Yes. But the community has more engagement, comments more, and votes positively more often since I started doing it this way. I also gain consistent new subscribers daily. I also have control over the "nozzle" so if multiple stories are worth posting but there are too many, I can sideline some for when the news slows down and post them later.
This is exactly how bots should be used on the platform. Unleashing a firehose of bot-post content drowns out user activity - using a bot to source filtered content that's actually interesting and valuable? I'm all for that.
I've been wondering why people have been reposting Reddit posts on Lemmy. If I wanted Reddit posts, I'd go on Reddit.
I assume many people migrated to Lemmy because they wanted a Reddit without spez.
Honestly, that's why I'm here. I do like the decentralized/non-corporate model though
I don't think you suck.
People left reddit because the reddit company sucks and they don't want to support it, not just spez.
But people still want to see a bunch of content. There's really no alternative to Reddit and Twitter because even if you can mimic their ideas, you won't be able to magically copy the user base and therefore the content generation. It took YEARS for those platforms to get to where they are.
Be the change you want to see, post more OC!
Reddit without astroturf, toxic redditor and farm bots.
I don't even care about that. I just can't use their app, it's garbage.
I immediately block them as soon as I realize they're a repost bot. Has cleaned up my feed nicely.
Just sucks that every new user will have to jump through hoops and block a dozen accounts before Lemmy is useable.
Not to mention that even opening some of the bot accounts pages to block them crashes the page sometimes because they have so many posts
Truthfully I found I have had to block quite a few more communities than just the reddit bots. Everything in the fediverse has required work so far. Worth it imo though.
Isnβt there an option to block bot accounts?
Some bots are actually useful; article shorteners for example.
I don't want to disable all bots just because of a few bad actors.
Iβm almost there, still at the internal dialogue of βoh damnitβ and mild annoyance stage but havenβt quite gotten to the βdo something about it stageβ
The ones that post 60 articles about every sports team from some aggregate of RSS feeds and run on a timer every 30 mins and clog up the feed are annoying as well
This is the main reason it's so annoying.
You try to scroll by new and you see a hundred posts on the same community from a reddit bot.
I don't understand why anyone cares. I'm pro-repost bot, whether a real human posts the content or not makes no difference to me, I just want the content.
The major one I've noticed/been annoyed by is someone reposting r/buildapc questions to Lemmy. None of the responses. No way to communicate to the original redditor to genuinely respond, just...here's the post devoid of all other information.
On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the most enjoyable, how would you rate that as "content?"
I want content thatβs interesting an engaging. Not a firehose of bullshit drowning out actual posts
Certified suck
There appears to be no difference in quality of the content for me.
Bad content gets downvoted, I'm with you on this one.
in settings you could choose to hide bot accounts
I donβt want to hide bot accounts, I want spam bots to be taken down so I can still enjoy decent bots.
I've used reposter bots on my hungarian meme community, since I can't make good enough memes and it's really niche. After a popular vote, I have disabled it, but unfortunately now the community is really really slow again.
Honestly, it's so easy to block accounts, so if there's only one bot in you community you should just keep it.
If they don't like it they can block it.
But then the bot serves no purpose but to push away new users who see only the bot content
Things would get really quiet without them.
Eventually I can see getting rid of them, but for now they're keeping Lemmy active.
Theyβre doing the opposite.
A new user comes to Lemmy and sees nothing but the same posts they saw on Reddit, but now all of them have no comments and almost no upvotes because thereβs so much of it posted to such a small environment that everything else gets drowned out.
After blocking every one of the dogshit bots I see just as many quality posts, by actual users, with actual comments.
I barely see them probably due to the communities I'm subscribed to, but to me Lemmy looks plenty active without them.
We should compile a list of the biggest repost bots so everyone can ban em
The great thing about lemmy, or the fediverse at large, is that people can have control and freedom over their social media platform. Block what you don't like and subscribe to what you do like. There's no single large entity deciding what everyone should see.
The bots exist because there are people that like them for whatever reason. Maybe there are niche communities that they want to keep up with, or career/school/local communities that they still want to read about without having to open up Reddit.
why do you suck?
It's fine asking why, but like I said above, people have the freedom to customize Lemmy to their liking. Let them do what they want and customize your experience for yourself.
The drawback to this is lower new user engagement.
Face it, most people who come look at Lemmy aren't looking to block several dozen accounts and communities to make the feed useable. Most don't even want to look for communities at first, they just want to see what the vibe is on the main feed, and judge from there
If we want to draw in more users and increase engagement, we need to cater to more than just the people who are ready to customize everything before judging. There's a few possible ways to go about this, but it's very clear that "just block things you don't like" isn't going to be enough.
I realize the drawbacks to any solution here, but as it stands now, even when I block the bots I don't like, there's not enough real content and discussion, and my own engagement is decreasing. The solution is probably not to ban all these bots, but leaving it alone as it is isn't working well either
They should create their own instance so the rest of us can defederate.
I'm convinced that Reddit themselves are either behind those bots, or are deliberately looking the other way. Those bots posting and commenting make the site look more active than it actually is.