• auzy1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    83·
    9 days ago

    Yep. I see this all over the new feed.

    It’s stupid just reposting 100% from another place. If I wanted that, I’d just go there.

    • [deleted]@piefed.worldEnglish
      11·
      9 days ago

      I do like that posters who seem ro manually post filter the stuff from other sites which in my opinion increases the average quality of posts. Reddit is a tidal wave with a few gems. The fediverse is mostly the gems, like using cheesecloth in a strainer.

  • Cris_Citrus (he/him <3)@piefed.zipEnglish
    804·
    9 days ago

    A day ago he reposted a meme about a doctor raping a woman because her credit card was declined and she couldnt pay for care.

    Thats VILE.

    In addition to the slimy pretending that his posts are organic traffic by not just marking his account as a bot, he is also importing the culture of casual sexism from reddit to the threadiverse.

          • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            52·
            9 days ago

            The solution is for all these people complaining to post new, original content every day and give lots of engagement with each one. Since that takes a shit ton of effort and most people work and have lives outside of the internet, they’re unwilling to do that because it would be a full time job, but they’ll still complain about it and demand that someone else fix it for them.

            • HerbGrower@slrpnk.netEnglish
              4·
              9 days ago

              I don’t expect it from everyone every day. You just need a few people at a time.

              Better ways to search for or pay attention to niche communities might help too. Scaled seems like its supposed to attempt to give them more focus but I don’t think it works very well when I have tried it. Problem is if I sub to 50 tiny communities and 1 popular one, my subscribed feed is dominated by the popular one and anything else will be drowned out.

    • TheShamMirrors@lemmy.todayEnglish
      12·
      9 days ago

      I’ll drop everything and come to piefed right now. On god.

      Question though: How or will you differentiate between people who are scheduling mass posts from reddit from people who just saved memes that also happened to be there?

      • Bumrocky@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        9 days ago

        I hate the reddit reposts where the only interaction is on reddit … that defeats the point of lemmy\fediverse?

    • LordMayor@piefed.socialEnglish
      5·
      9 days ago

      If you can detect it, you could auto ban them, no?

      I think a rule against serial reposting would be fine and, probably, popular.

      • SolSerkonos@piefed.socialEnglish
        11·
        9 days ago

        I wouldn’t like a blanket rule like that. I think that dropdown menu in the screenshot is perfect. Especially if paired with a toggle in the community settings that lets the mods ban posts from them entirely.

      • Despair@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        Isn’t that just a client side filter, would be up to whoever runs the community/instance rules for handling bot accounts, and if they feel the accounts should be banned.

        • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
          81·
          9 days ago

          Yes the screenshot is just the user settings. Admins are going to have to manually designate accounts as reposters because I haven’t even tried to make an automated detection. That would be very hard to get right.

          • SourGumGum@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            8 days ago

            How is this any different to a user blocking them directly? What a useless feature.

            Edit: Really? Trying to mark me as a bot or possibly dox my IP by visiting your link because I thought it was a bad idea?

      • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
        31·
        9 days ago

        It’s manually-applied and reversible. I can’t reliably code an automatic reposter detection system because they’re all different. It’s going to have to be a human judgement.

        Similar to labelling things as AI-generated or NSFW - being a reposter isn’t necessarily bad. It just means that people who don’t mind whether they see it can do so and those who don’t want to can avoid it, without the conflict that ensues when people with different needs and tastes are forced to share space.

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          9 days ago

          And you’re leaving this up to individuals, not your judgement, right? If so, good idea. If not, eww.

          • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
            32·
            9 days ago

            Individuals, yeah. Instance admins are going to need to designate reposters if they refuse to self-designate (and Lemmy doesn’t have functionality for them to do that, except as a bot) and then it’s up to individuals to decide whether they filter out reposters or not.

            • ayyy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              8 days ago

              Oh, so you’re leaving the labeling to instance admins, not individuals. That’s problematic, but you do you.

              • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
                2·
                8 days ago

                The label doesn’t do anything until individuals opt in to filtering based on it.

                We can’t leave it to the reposters to self-identify because

                1. Lemmy does not have the functionality to do that and

                2. reposters are deceptive and sneaky

  • loam@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    361·
    9 days ago

    The worst part is the lack of transparency and credit to the actual authors. Many of the reposts are personal to the OOP, and it feels extra scummy.

  • soratoyuki@piefed.zipEnglish
    322·
    9 days ago

    All of those posts are heavily upvoted and have multiple comments though? Accreditation, etc. are all valid critiques, but I genuinely don’t understand why so many people care about the provenance of posts.

    • SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      184·
      9 days ago

      I post pictures of bread I bake and I’m on the upper lower middle side of mid for my baking skills.

      If someone picks the best bread on a subreddit with a million members my posts will be buried instantly so what’s the point in adding real content?

      • soratoyuki@piefed.zipEnglish
        123·
        9 days ago

        I think that’s a bad analogy for a few reasons. First, all the examples you’ve posted are specifically meme template-friendly subs, which makes sense since they’re inherently easy to repost. I don’t think think a baking community would have that problem. But even if it did, you could just start a new baking community that bans reposts? Given how unpopular repost bots are, I assume your anti-repost baking community would be more popular than the hypothetical pro-repost baking community that your posts are buried in. Assuming that repost bots are drowning out more organic content, which prima facie doesn’t seem to be the case in either community you screenshotted as examples. Both seem like pretty solid examples of their being no other content.

        Structurally speaking, up and down votes should ideally, roughly sort posts by quality. A post being buried (unpopular) in a community isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

        If fear of not getting enough internet points is what’s keeping someone from posting, that’s more on them.

          • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            54·
            9 days ago

            You’re not battling anyone for engagement because you’re not posting anything yourself. All you can offer is hyptheticals with no supporting evidence.

            Why don’t you go hang out in /askscience or /askhistorians with Portnou if you want all organic content. He and his multiple personalities are posting there dozens of times per day and those communities are just popping off with content and activity.

              • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
                41·
                9 days ago

                kinda wierd for someone with a yr history that only posted a few things early on and then a few more 3 months ago who then also is on so unoften he does not recognize your handle to make this statement about your user. had to tag that.

              • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                45·
                9 days ago

                Upset that your daily screenshots of the mod log aren’t getting much engagement? Perhaps you’re jealous that your reposts from /r/news aren’t getting as much traction as time2lose’s reposts? What engagement are you generating other than your current crusade against this specific user?

                Edit: its also interesting that not only have you started a crusade against users for posting content that you don’t agree with (even though you don’t hold yourself to the same standard as evidenced by all your own reposts), but you’ve also started a community for you to start a crusade against mods for making decisions that you don’t agree with. There seems to be a pattern here where everything revolves around you and everyone needing to meet your demands.

      • odelik@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        That’s a very fancy way of saying, “I bake the middest of mid bread.” And I approve

      • NathanRanch@lemmy.zipEnglish
        21·
        9 days ago

        The canary sings despite the cage. You don’t have to sing to anyone except for when you want to

  • rosahaj@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    27·
    9 days ago

    Does blocking not work? I’m not the biggest fan of repost bots myself, but they exist for a specific purpose. There are times when you have to take efforts to curate your own experience, also.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
    282·
    9 days ago

    Personally I don’t mind it too much, as long as

    • there’s no vote manipulation to artificially boost the post
    • there are genuine interactions in the comments
    • the account posting this is properly labelled as a bot account (if it’s an actual bot)
    • GardenGeek@europe.pubEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      Looking at this specific accounts history it seems as if its a regular poster (with a bit controverse ethics about content creation if you will) and as if OP has just labeled the account to be a bot.

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
    282·
    9 days ago

    So I’m not looking for a fight, but can we have a friendly talk about the value of repost bots in the context of this medium? I just feel like yapping, so feel free to ignore if no.

    Lemmy shares a format with Reddit - they’re feed aggregators. Their value proposition is having everything in one place so a community can pass judgment on it all. That’s why people hate reposts and bad faith actors, adverse or opaque sorting algorithms, and agenda-driven moderators - they directly devalue the medium. We tend to like original content, genuine sentiments and human connections, and relevant posts because those directly support the inherent value of a feed aggregator.

    I’m not convinced either way about repost bots, yet. They’re clearly not genuine or original, and too many of them will tend to obscure - you know what? I got there in the end I see it now.

    I could still see the value in a carefully chosen, rate-limited bot that reposts with the blessing of the moderators, but the rate and curation are important, and the rate has to take into account the number of other communities using them versus the number of active users, so it’s not trivial to decide what the right amount would be.

    • im_fine_sandy@nord.pubEnglish
      23·
      9 days ago

      Repost bots discourage new users and kill engagement.

      Suppose you’re into trampolines but there’s no community for that here. You create one, and to kick start it you get a repost bot to repost from the other place.

      Over the coming weeks a few fediverse users see your community but see that they’re all reposts with no comments, there’s nothing to really engage with there, so no one does.

      Next month someone signs up to the fediverse and joins a few special interest communities. /c/sports, /c/gymnastics, and /c/trampolines. There might actually be real posts and discussions in /c/sports, but that new users feed is overrun with reposts in /c/trampolines. It’s a very clear signal that there’s no content here, all the content is on reddit.

      If you actually want a community, then you can read about trampolines on the other site, and manually repost things yourself as a human.

      • HerbGrower@slrpnk.netEnglish
        9·
        9 days ago

        I think it can work for meme/shitpost type communities. But anything hobby related you really need to add something to prompt actual discussion.

        Although if you have a bot doing it there isn’t even any quality control.

      • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
        4·
        9 days ago

        Quality of engagement is important, you’re right. By the time I’d written everything out I’d already mostly thought myself almost all the way to being against bots, but this makes sense. Taking your position, bots gotta go.

    • soratoyuki@piefed.zipEnglish
      11·
      9 days ago

      I guess I’m in the extreme minority, but like… All the posts in OP are heavily upvoted and spawned comments. That’s… good? I don’t see why people care more about where a post comes from than the fact that large stretches of the Threadiverse are barren and reposts are the only content available.

      Sanitation is my most upvoted Threadiverse poster, and I’d rather have their content than nothing. Which, largely, is the alternative.

      • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
        3·
        9 days ago

        That’s what was giving me so much uncertainty in either direction, there’s always some gulf between how people act and what they say they want. You have to come at it not just from a metrics angle, but with a little wisdom as well. I think sure, people upvote bots like crazy and that’s probably why Reddit doesn’t get rid of them because it helps their metrics. We don’t rely on that financial model, and bots probably do stifle genuine discussion to some degree by sheer noise:signal. I could be swayed still, but I’d need to see solid evidence to show that bots actually help communities thrive. It’s probably highly contextual as well, some types of !c probably benefit from bots more than others would, but any bots will tend to dominate an /all feed.

    • crandall@lemmy.todayEnglish
      11·
      9 days ago

      Unfortunately they don’t create the same engagement as a natural post. No one wants to comment on a wall of bot posts with no human involved. All it does is kill actual community engagement. Lemmy and reddit are not just link aggregators, they are forums for discussion, with humans.

    • myyass@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      9 days ago

      FIGHT!

      The main issue for small subs can be solved with pinned threads.

      The whole, where do I go to eat this here or what restaurant is good for this food or who does this kind of work locally or look at what I ate at so and so restaurant and you probably can imagine the theme here. Put into one post and ban whoever advertises. No need to repost pinned threads.

      FINNISH HYMN

      I think negative interaction is a good start. There’s a reason people get their posts deleted, shadow banned, or just banned.

      • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        Pinned threads solve for perpetual topics within (specific) communities sure, but the main area where too many repost bots will do the most harm if left unchecked is when cruising all or local. People who sort by new are the lifeblood of a feed’s (federated) community, and if there’s not enough of them to boost the most valuable signals, the (federated) community won’t grow and might even shrink.

    • glimse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      9 days ago

      Time2lose is almost definitely u/sanitation after he got torn apart in his “everyone who doesn’t like my repost bot is wrong” post. They’re using the same software that trunctates post titles. They’re both clearly Russian and have made some anti-ukraine comments.

      And not to get all conspiratorial but it is a biiit suspicious that a Russian bot is spamming tabloids to the US news communities when we’re approaching an important election. At the very least, it’s annoying as fuck.

      I don’t think the user you’re talking about in the top post is the same, though. Different posting styles, totally different content. I also don’t think it’s the same person as the (thankfully dead) SteamAndEpic account, either, though that one was also Russian. Just a lazy spammer this time.

      Wholly agreed with your conclusion, though.

      [Edit] I also don’t think ooli is the same user as oldman for similar reasons