I’d like to lead my thoughts with a quote from sunarus regarding bots within lemm.ee:

“Bots must not be responsible for the majority of content in any community”

There are two entire instances that immediately spring to mind, zerobytes.monster’s b0t user, and lemmit.online. Their content is quite literally 90% bot content with 0 engagement, and they spam constantly.

Now here at lemm.ee we generally don’t defend from stuff, that’s actually why I prefer this instance. Yes, you can block the bot users and that solves the problem, but hear me out:

These bots ruin the experience on Lemmy for new users. They spam so many posts, attempting to block them from a mobile app will usually crash the app. If you’re a new user coming to Lemm.ee sorting by all, you see tons and tons of empty posts.

Zerobytes is particularly egregious because it doesn’t even repost actual content, just thousands and thousands of links to Reddit posts. It’s a spam instance, period, and I feel strongly about this.

Lemmit.online isn’t quite as bad, but it’s an entire instance dedicated to spam reposting everything from Reddit. All the posts have zero engagement, and the comment value is gone so everything decent gets buried.

Yes there are ways around this on an individual user level, but then you’re creating a context where there’s even less engagement in the vast majority of “new” posts.

Anyway, thems my thoughts. Repost bots are stupid, one that drive traffic to Reddit are even worse. Thoughts?

  • Spzi@lemm.ee
    ·
    10 months ago

    Just today I blocked a bot and a very active user (?) because they clutter my feed.

    I mostly blame the poor Lemmy algorithms. I select "New Comments" and still get 33% posts with 0 comments and 1 points, shared between two accounts. I'd rather see a post from yesterday with actual engagement.

    Yes, I very much agree with the general lemm.ee policy. But I also found your argument convincing:

    These bots ruin the experience on Lemmy for new users.

    Trying to be constructive, I have two thoughts:

    1. Can we hear opinions in favor of these accounts with thousands of posts, most of which are 1 points, 0 comments?
    2. How about reaching out to these accounts, asking them to post less, or less non-engaging stuff?
    • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
      ·
      10 months ago

      To address your 2nd point, lemmit.online addresses that in their FAQ, they won’t tone down the posting and suggest defederating if you dislike the automated content