I started working on a script that will take top post from subreddits to post then to corresponding c/ on lemmy with various accounts to give the impression of minimal activity.
The idea comes from a lemmy user etting saying they would never want to support reddit with lemmy content (or in general), and instead just taking the content from there and putting it on lemmy.
It feels like I’m just kinda sewing lemmy into the human centipede that is content filler. I can see why content does get reposted it’s entertaining and engaging and they propagate.
It does feel like a Pandora’s jar like I’m laying a foundation for a bot army even though I only plan to be small scale
As long as you enable the ‘bot’ tag, so I can block it, it’s fine.
Lemmy needs to stop trying to copy Reddit; community names like Earthporn, Foodporn, F*ckCars etc. Voting is broken on Lemmy because it’s broken on Reddit.
The biggest thing Lemmy needs right now is commenters. We have more than enough news links with no comments.
Isn‘t the Reddit front page full of reposted older threads by bots anyway? That repost bot would repost reposts of other bots then. I am not sure what this would accomplish other than turning Lemmy into yet another soulless content mill.
Something similar has been done before and it was really easy to spot. I won’t get into the details, but it was really trashy. There are other communities that try to copy Reddit already and I block most of them.
Communities driven by one persons posts or by a cluster of bots generally suck. Yes, communities must start with only one person, but if nobody else likes the idea and the community doesn’t drive participation from Lemmy as a whole, it’s simply noise.
Post content that you like, in communities that matter to you. If you like a particular strain of content, start a new community. People will join or they won’t. Read the room and continue driving the community, or don’t.
Automated posts have their place, but most people can spot it fairly quick. It generally doesn’t drive participation as much as organic posts.
Bluntly though, if you want Reddit content, go to Reddit. Lemmy isn’t Reddit and that is what people generally like about it.
if you want Reddit content, go to Reddit.
This makes zero sense. “Reddit content” is not exclusive to Reddit, and the people who came to Lemmy are not looking for alternative “content”, they are looking for an alternative, non-corporate controlled platform. Telling people to go to Reddit plays exactly to their game.
We already have lemmit.online for scalping Reddit stuff.
No thank you. Just leeching content from reddit will never get Lemmy anywhere.
I blocked all content reposted from Lemmy (there was an instance dedicated to that iirc).
First of all, posts without comments are pointless. Interaction and comments is what grows Lemmy. Second, bot posts are not well received by most here I think.
I can see it useful only as a “reddit backup” of kind, in case the platform goes offline for good and all that is lost.
I would worry for the level of moderation required to filter shitty / ai / bots etc.
Please don’t
I block any and all bots I see regardless of good intent, and suggest everyone else do the same. There’s enough living humans to post news articles and memes. We don’t need bot filler.
That seems like too much effort. Unless someone documents all the bots on lemmy
Just tag your bots as bots and the default “hide bot posts” option will do it automatically. But it requires the bot operators to properly tag their bot accounts as bots.
If people would stop making them, it’s would be zero effort. But sadly, this is where we are.
That makes absolutely no sense, we have more than enough activity on lemmy without reddit trash. We don’t need a million posts a second we need a steady stream of high quality content made by real people.
Automatic posting from Reddit has been tried before and has been pretty unpopular for the most part. Here’s an old thread with some good discussion about it:
ha, theres an entire instance dedicate to this process besides all the github bot scripts… this is nothing new here.
maybe make sure and throw the bot flag so people can filter accordingly
Yeah I see the ones for all the adult content. Man I’m bad at researching before I program.
I’m pretty much thinking about putting it in the description that they’re bots
There’s an explicit flag that can be toggled on every account to mark them as bots. If you’re acting in good faith that flag should definitely be toggled.
Please let us have this forum without subjecting us to content from that other site.
Idk how to feel about this
When reddit first started, it almost failed because there was no content.
So what they did was had staff members post, and reply to each other. They made sure to reply to any actual new people. And then they did this from hundreds of automated accounts.
They simulated activity to promote actual real activity.
I know everyone will disagree with me, but I’d say DON’T flag them as bots. If the bots fool humans, and cause growth of the fediverse/lemmy? Great. In time you can turn off the bots. But only once actual humans are here.
I was thinking about putting my personal account on the script so that way I can get notifications and engage.
I like to think that lemmy users could just enjoy the content without having to go to reddit
The problem isn’t content, it’s engagement on the content. Folks complain that niche communities have no engagement, just a bunch of posts by a single person… but it feels like 95% of the time, if I comment on those posts, there’s no reply, not even from the OP, and that discourages further posting.
If you’re willing to engage on everything you post, I don’t see the harm in it, but at that point, why even use a bot? Why not just find content you like (or have the bot notify you of content), then post it yourself as an actual human?
FYI, there’s many bot accounts already reposting stuff. There was an entire instance previously dedicated to it, though I think it shut down at some point. It was not popular, most people blocked the accounts / instances and they just clogged up the feed for newcomers due to the lack of engagement.
