1y ago

Reddit repost bots are spam, and that needs to be stopped.

Ok, imagine this, you are on reddit (say, a slow hobby focused subreddit), everybody there is nice and knowledgeable, and one day, the mods there announced that since there is not enough "content" on the sub, they are going to use a bot to repost content from 9gag in order to "bolster engagement" and "grow the community".

How would you feel about that?

If you feel upset and grossed out, you're exactly right.

I don't think there is a single non-spam subreddit where that kind of behavior would be tolerated without being called out for blatant mod abuse. No community in the world would ever tolerate automated reposting from another website, not reddit, not 4chan, not any forums of any size, even 9gag, I repeat, BLOODY 9GAG, was tired of being called out for reddit reposting and started making original content.

So why exactly should this kind of behavior be tolerated here?

Now, I'm sure some mods here did it with good intentions, but again, the road to the hell that is modern reddit is PAVED with good intentions. Content for the sake of content is bad, and we already knew it is bad, which is why Gallowboob was so thoroughly disliked, he generates """"""content"""""", in other words, spam that drowns out the normal people who can't compete with a professional marketer, much less a bot, which is exactly the reason why "Just block the bots" doesn't work, because it ruins the genuine engagements on a forum by drawing people to the lowest common denominator of """""""""""content""""""""""""".

Reddit, over the years, has turned into a platform for "bolstering engagement" for advertisers, and it does that by algorithmically stoking conflicts between people so they would endlessly argue and doomscroll. Why would we want that here? Now, I think most of us like the Lemmy/kbin right now because of the lack of bots here, and the conversations happen naturally and genuinely. I've even seen people here try to engage the bots, not realizing that they would never get a response out of them, because it felt normal to just talk about things.

(Eat your robot hearts out, @L4s and @BotIt)

Suppose then, if this repost bot situation was indeed temporary, why would people want to make original content if they are just going to be drowned out by bots? What's to stop someone from turning on bots from /r/dankmemes or /r/tiktokcringe? The bots are not members of the community, because they are not people (save the /r/botsright joke for more appropriate times), and over time, we will just become dependent on the bots hosing us down directly from that burning dumpster fire and become doomscrolling addicts again.

That's the number two lesson from the failure of Voat: that repost bots, like hate, should also not be tolerated, and Reddit will never die if we keep feeding it.

Everybody here are still currently all "Oh fuck reddit, fuck spez, I deleted my reddit account and all of my comments and will never go back again", but after finally getting away from reddit, why are you so insistent on trying to turn this place back to the worst part of reddit again?

And if the reddit migration on July 1st does indeed occur, do you think they would be ecstatic to see a place that's mostly reddit reposts, but with less """""""""""""""""""content"""""""""""""""""""? If they wanted reddit, why wouldn't they just go back to reddit?

When will we finally be rid of reddit, if we are the ones keeping it on life support?

I will say, if I sound frustrated, it's because I am frustrated, because I actually can't believe I even had to say this. Judging from the comments on this thread yesterday, I think a majority of people here would agree with me. We have something good here, and I'd like to keep it that way a bit longer.

Now, I very much appreciate that our admins here at lemmy.world and their amazing job of preemptively blocking suspicious bot infested instances, so I'm asking politely for @ruud, @Antik and the rest of our good admin team here to put their foot down on not allowing reddit repost spambots and nip this problem in the bud before it takes root, so I can get back to shitposting in peace.

Be better than reddit.

Burn reddit down.

121 comments

Hi!
We actually had a talk about bots this week between admins and some mods!
There was a bot from Lemmy.online that did nothing but import Reddit threads to their instance and when we checked they imported nearly 40k threads from different subreddits. All these threads were posted into communities where the Lemmy.online bot was the only moderator. So that would mean there would be actually zero moderation there and it would ultimately fall on us as admins. So we blocked that bot and instance. We nipped that one right in the bud already!
We are still discussing in where to draw the line, ofcourse there are useful bots: I like those tldr-bots for example. But those should only be active in communities where they have been activated by the moderators.
As you probably noticed this week has already been a big one on the part of decision making and behind the scenes work trying to get this instance updated to 0.18.1 and such, so we didn't finish talking about this amongst the LW team yet. So yes, feel free to express your thoughts on bots and how you feel this should be handled in this thread and you can be sure everything here will be considered!
- Hi Antik! Appreciate you for listening to mine and many people here's concerns. My thoughts on this is pretty clear, I don't want bots here, but I will concede that the tl;dr bot is useful to others, even though I don't personally use it, so it should stay where it's needed.
  However, having a bot running around reposting 5 articles a minute from reddit sets a very dangerous precedent for the quality and community here, and the moderators that set them up usually don't even check what they are posting as they are automated feeds, they have comments calling the article out, but of course, there won't be any response from a bot.
  A lot of it is just ragebait from /r/politics and fearmongering bait from /r/technology. I just don't want that feeling of awfulness here, and I think many would agree with me too.
  
  The consensus so far was a bit like this: as long as the bot is in a channel that is actively moderated and not just spamming as you say "5 articles per minute", then that would be ok. We're still a bit unsure where to draw the line here, as I said we haven't really finished that discussion yet - this week has already been quite eventful.
  But even yesterday I received a report from a bot that reported a post from a user who simply said they were "having a shitty day" as "Toxic and Rude". Those kind of bots will only give us more work with the false positives. So I reached out to the owner of that bot and told them we definitely didn't want that kind of "help".
- Thanks for blocking that instance.
  I tried to explain to their admin why the entire concept was bad for the fediverse but they didn't seem to understand.
  People can do whatever they want with their instances, but something like that should defederate themselves and live in a void.
  That isn't the way to try and build content or community over here. We have the high ground. We don't need to stoop down to their level.
- All these threads were posted into communities where the Lemmy.online bot was the only moderator.
  That's the heart of the problem for me. 40k posts with zero moderation is a problem.
- There's a bot I've been seeing these past couple of days that is constantly reposting posts with the title cut off in half. Like, it'd just cut it off mid sentence and replace the rest with three dots. I think it's called @L4s@lemmy.world
  
  My apologies, it is due to the character limit as far as I understand it.

Totally agree - when the server was quiet and empty it was one thing, but the server isn't quiet or empty anymore.
It's annoying seeing memes reposted by bots (people can do that just fine all on their own), but I've seen stuff like AITA threads - the OP isn't even here to read it... Is the idea to judge people behind their backs?
I found it extra upsetting because I'm hoping the Lemmy version will be more like AITA using to be - it turned from "who is the problem here" to "did you have the right to do this"
- We're not on reddit here, we can just call out AITA for the cesspool of lazy creative writing and the absurdly judgemental responses it always was. Nothing like that sub that embodies the worst of reddit should make it over here.

Beware.. borderline elitist thought below.
There's a group of well-meaning folks (more than I am comfortable with) who want EVERYONE to come over from reddit. A subset of those have decided that the best way to do this is by mirroring content.
THAT IS THE LAST THING I WANT ON ANY TIMELINE.
I came here to GTFO of a forum aggregator that became a corpo-coopted hellscape of shitposts, bots, and shouting into the void; and I sure as hell don't want anyone to bring that shit over here.
A miniscule fraction of users on reddit post, comment, or even help to rank content in any valuable way. The rest detract from any sense of community, clutter conversations.
They need not be placated, invited, or made to feel at home here.
They still have reddit.
Let them use it.
They LIKE it.
- Exactly. They can choose to come here, but if they want to go down with the ship, let them.
  But I don't want them to drag us down with them.
  
  Don't get me wrong, I want reddit to feel the pain for saying the quiet part loud, and clear. I hope there's something/somewhere else people can go to do it.
  Most people just want a place to shout at one or two other people over bot posted, polarizing ragebait. I don't, but they have several other places that are already established.
  They don't need threaded discussion because no longform/non-topical discussion is happening:
  They typically don't reply to others (or even a second time) unless they've gone full tilt. Even then, the opinions they don't like are usually blocked forever after that single exchange .
  My personal feelings about musk aside - twitter (if it increased the character limits) would be PERFECT for the overwhelming majority of reddit users. Mayyyybe mastodon.

Yea I think bot posting and rehosting content from reddit has served its purpose but come July should be dialed down significantly.
Even if it isn't reddit content, bot posting should be restricted. There are niche examples where it's beneficial. Eg, Daily Stock Tickers, Geolocal weather, or weekly Q&A threads, but those are clearly different than just content aggregation.
Comment bots also provide value. I agree grammar/etc bots are annoying but as long as people can easily block/delete their comments its okay. Prequel memes chat bots were hilarious and if a community wants them they should be allowed.
People are what makes internet forums fun. Keeping lemmy.world a space for human interactions is important.

I agree, I personally don't want them, I like talking to people. I brought it up when they first started spamming, and I blocked lemmit. It was actually the first time i ever blocked anything lol. Out of my control after that, but it's definitely important to talk about it. I don't think we need them. Been having fun so far.
Fwiw, if the posts rolled in way slower, with no bot tags, it probably would have flown under the radar lol.
- I'm glad you are having fun here, we all are, and I feel free after being away from the awfulness there, and I'd like to keep this place feeling fun for a while.
  
  I went back today for a last hurrah, and it's pretty terrible, diffrrent energy. I couldnt tell if it was always like that or just a perspective change for me...and the best/worst part is I can see this easily devolving. But there are baked in work arounds...I imagine a lot of settling and splintering into smaller instances/communities as everyone blocks/subs over time. I personally like smaller communities, but am unsure where I'd settle to, because I largely avoid people. I'm quite new to social media tbh. I could even see lemmy being the reason that I stop coming on the internet altogether(in a good way). I can dream, right? Can I have my Vo5 back before I go, though? (:

I will talk because lifting content from Reddit is how mildly Infuriating got its feet off the ground in the first place, and has the subscriber count it has.
It hasn't relied only on that, I have been finding my own original content and posting it there myself but it's hard when I feel I am the only one actively contributing. Many people here still are very much lurkers and will only want to scroll through what other people post and not make their own content.
There isn't anything wrong with that, but you are going to find people won't keep coming back without things to keep them interested.
That said context matters, there is a difference between a hobbiest community, and somewhere like mildly Infuriating where it's a place to just share things that mildly Infuriates people. Whether right or wrong, I do not see an issue with Reddit reposts or reposts from anywhere but I hope more people do actually create content... And I also hope the people in this thread who are against Reddit reposts are actively engaging communities themselves or you aren't really setting up these communities for success.
I do not agree with bot reposting, I feel that would end in diminishing returns anyway, whilst you have mountains of content, you have too much content and it doesn't give people enough time to build up discussions and drowns out people who will legitimately post their own threads. Meaning you will likely not see anyone bother posting at all.
In the end... Banning outright, doesn't feel right. Having them exist as their own places, whilst not something I 100% agree with don't think getting the pitchforks out and wanting them to disappear is the answer when you can make your own community on another instance and grow it organically. Then block ones that you don't like. Which you will be doing regardless as we have federated instances that will not align with you morally/ethically anyway until they are eventually defederated if at all.
- Not having Karma also didn't feel right originally either. But it ended up making this place way better.
  I don't want to be rude, but let me ask you this question: Why should I move to another instance instead of doing all we can to stop this place from turning into reddit? Why should I move to Mars instead of trying to stop climate change from destroying us all?
  To be a redditor is to despair. Despair is the enemy of progress.
  
  In a place as vast as the fediverse can be and at such early stages you have the power to make bigger changes than you would on Reddit.
  You have the power to shape the culture of Lemmy, can you ask the owners of these communities to change course? Absolutely.
  Do they have to oblige? No, not unless the instance rules dictate they have to, but that is entirely at the discretion of the instance admins. Then there are a lot of instances each with their own rules and culture.
  I think you're being hyperbolic, but you will have diverse opinions on this matter, and the only right answer is what results in foot traffic for the Fediverse and drives interest. In the end our goals are the same but done differently.
  My answer to why should you move is, you are going to need to change the mind of every potential new person who joins with an idea to lift content from Reddit, I commend you if you have the time to do that, but I personally don't. It's easier to shape the culture of a website when you have a level of influence to be an example to what is the gold standard so to speak.
  You also have to be very careful because there is an elitest attitude that might push people away from Lemmy entirely.

It's going to come to a grinding halt when those bots lose API access July 1st
- Good, I hope they die.
- Most of them don't use the API afaik
- Just another way Reddit decisions will help Lemmy grow - can't get drowned in repost bots if they're cut off at the knees :)

I agree. Bots should only be allowed if they show exceptional utility to the community.
- Yeah, nobody really needs a bot that counts how many times you say "this" or smugly correcting your grammar. It was so awful there at reddit.
  
  BEEP BOOP
  Hello there, I'm amicable-bot!
  You just did a heckin no no by using the word "sm*g".
  It's important to remember that the use of language like this can be demeaning to others.
  You're welcome for the helpful information, and have a great day!
  BEEP BOOP
  
  I hated the grammar correcting bots, because I often misspell things due to being dyslexic. Or I used the wrong words, because I'd be trying to write in a language that wasn't my first one. It got old reaaaal fast.
  
  I think it adds character. I didnt like when they were global, but when they hung around certain subreddits it gave flavor to the place
  Limited and local are the keywords here though

People set them up to help grow communities by having a lot of content but it just kills them instead. I opened a Linux gaming community and it was 95% just bot reposts from the Linux gaming subreddit, all with zero comments and 1 or maybe 2 up votes per post. It just makes you not want to comment at all cause what is the point?
I came to Lemmy to get away from reddit, bot reposts just funnel traffic back to reddit. The endless reposts just leads to the one conclusion of "Oh, this is all just links to reddit, I should just go directly to reddit as it will be a better source for this content."
Meanwhile I stumbled upon another community that barely had any posts and it has much more interaction because the few users that -are- there feel much more included. In the early 2000s I was part of several forums that really only had about 10 active members, but they were active and eventually saw growth. People join and see a small group of people talking and then join in the conversation.
- Oh, absolutely. I'm taking care to respond to everything in this thread right now because I want us to not be reddit and be a real community.

I agree, they are annoying to see and there is more content coming from local users now

Like a lot of people here on Lemmy, I was on reddit for 10+ years... and I'd say for a couple of years that half of redit are reposts... the same pic, the same caption, and often the same top comments reposted by bots to gain karma.
At one time I was blocking reposters but now that there's certainly hundreds of bots doing it, it's harder.
I will not miss reddit.
- And we need to prevent this place from turning into reddit, and getting rid of the repost bots is the first item on the list.

I started blocking the bots. They're annoying AF.

I posted a few days ago about this and got tons of agreement that it's at least dumb, really hoping we can get the admins to stop this shit. Manually blocking them myself as they show up is a losing war.
- There is a setting to not show bots.
  
  The bots that repost reddit were not properly marked as bots.
  I've stated why "just block them if you don't want to see them" doesn't work, because they are by nature, attention sucking black holes that ruin the feeling of community by splitting them and drawing them into low effort content.

So many communities are just full of it with no comments. Pretty sure it's putting people off posting too.

Im split on this. I don’t want a ton of bots spamming memes all over Lemmy but I really do want all the articles that are posted from the news subs to make their way over here. The only thing I find useful from Reddit is that. If one bot reposting all the news means thousands of actual users don’t have to engage with Reddit then I think that’s a net positive.
Since joining lemmy I’ve mostly avoided Reddit but during that 24-48hr period where Wagner was revolting against Putin i had to go back to Reddit because their up to minute news feed was posting updates faster than what we have here. If a bot brought all those posts over here I’d be over the moon.
- I agree with all of this, but some people like reddit for other reasons, say, /r/videos for example. Lemmy is currently lacking that, and if we can fill that piece it would mean a lot less users even thinking about reddit. That's mine and a few other's goals here, make it so nobody even considers going to reddit.

I think bots can be used for news etc. I don't see anything wrong with that. It's basically like blog post with discussion. Give you topic to talk about. Obviously bots commenting makes little to sense.

People don't get it. We don't need another reddit, this fight is about putting down shitty corporate practices. People just want their echo chamber dopamine fix.
- Exactly. We need to stop this place from becoming a corporate hellhole for marketing firms, and you have to ban the bots.

Weird part is we've had better solutions than that for a long time.
If automatically fetching content from reddit is something someone is set on, the best solution in my opinion is something like a digest bot. I.e., here's your daily/weekly/monthly post with the top threads from other communities (like reddit, or other non-federated systems). If you want to talk about any of those threads, you can talk about it in the digest post.
- And Lemmit.online is that for the fediverse. But lemmy.world is not that, and should not be that.
  
  To my understanding, Lemmit does every individual comment. A digest is usually more like a single post per day (or whatever time period) fetching a limited amount of the most popular content. So, instead of every single comment on the steamdeck subreddit federating over on lemmit, you'd have say... links and titles for the top 5 that day show up as a singular text post.
- It would also fix the issue of spam/junk posts that get brought over automatically by those bots.
  
  Yeah, would solve most of the problems people have with the lemmit system. I'm honestly kind of surprised someone hasn't ran with the concept. Kind of like a variation on sneakpeekbot from reddit but posting it's details automatically on a schedule instead of in response to a mention and filtering it's searches to a time period.
  Hmm, I wonder who maintains that bot.

Hi @MargotRobbie@lemmy.world - you already saw my post on this in the l4s thread but I thought it would be good to post it here too.
We agree that we don't want bots blindly importing from other news sources, be it reddit or others.
Bots in general should be allowed, as long as:
they follow the lemmy.world guidelines on content moderation
they have the approval from the community moderator/owner they post in
they are clearly identifying as a bot
they are not "spammy"
they are not used for advertisement
Malicious bots and bots going against these rules should be reported and they will be banned.
- Hey, appreciate your thoughts on this topic, I think that's a considerate and measured approach.
  To a majority of us, I think we're all figuring this out as we go. Let's just see how this works out, and I really do hope this works.
  Again, thanks.
  
  Yes, same for us @MargotRobbie@lemmy.world (the real one btw). Sometimes we need a bit of time to decide where to draw the line. Example: I just had to ban a bot who's only post was an ad. So let's add "no advertisements" to the list, even though it's in the general server rules.

It may change after 1 July.
Also, you can just browse your subscribed communities instead.
- Unless one of your subscribed communities is a victim of this spam. That's kinda rough.
  
  I haven't noticed that happening much. In fact, most of the lemmy spam bots I've seen have all been in their own instances, eg lemmy.link and lemmit.online.
  However, if it's a subscribed community that you specifically want then you should contact that community's moderators. If they won't take action, then unsubscribing is always an option.

Agree, we should start banning repost bots.

80% of my bans on my sub were re-post bots.
They are relentless and annoying AF...

Reddit has enough repost bots as-is, last thing we need is bots reposting stuff from Reddit. Let's not become another component of the Inhuman Centipede.
- That's a hilarious yet way too descriptive image.

Gonna play devil's advocate on this, reposts are very welcome in communities when the content is less personal and prone to discussion. The only thing that I can think of that fits this description is porn, but then again that's half of reddit.

memes are reposts though tbh

I block every reddit reposting bot I see. I left reddit for a reason.
- Yeah, and we should keep them out. The no Nazi in punk bar story still applies here.
- Can you give me a few names of these? I fail to recognize which account might be a bot.
  
  I wasn't formerly aware L4s was a bot and I'm a little bit pissed about it, so here's that profile.
  Others I've already blocked are linkbot and also NewsUser, who meant well but whose multiple automated news feeds on their own instance were basically the only thing on my timeline. I get the intent and I feel bad about it, but we're talking over a thousand posts to just one of their several communities in the span of a week. It is too much for me.

I understand this perspective, but it is very biased and might just not be true for every case.
E.g. imagine someone wanting to migrate their community to Lemmy, but there are very few people following. Even if they post there, most people might stay in the origin community because there is just so much more content and they can engage with many other people. This is a vicious cycle, because no-one is there, no-one will go there.
Now, bring a repost bot in the game: Suddenly the alternative becomes viable, because the content is also available there. People are much easier able to switch because the difference is minimal. After a while, the original content increases and the necessarity for the repost bot decreases until it can be turned off. Much easier to get people away from Reddit and build a community.
Of course, this is also a specific example. And if there are existing communities with people that suddenly get spammed, that's a problem. But my point is, it's just not black and white, there can be different situations in which something can make sense or not.
Therefore I'd be clearly against blocking something like that sidewide because it can be helpful for single communities. Its totally reasonable for a community mod to block them if they personally conceive the bot to be spam for them, but yeah, I wouldn't agree with the statement that they need to be spam in general.

This is why I stopped development of BotIt, if people don't want it then I won't continue making it
- And I appreciate you for that. Now let's fix it together.
- I don't think you should hang it all up yet.
  Thinking aloud - I have a few ideas where bots would be beneficial with targeted criteria from a handful of reasonably decent sources.
  It's not necessarily a bad thing to snatch and dump news from their sources for news mags...
  Webcomics, podcasts.. there's probably a ton of reasons it wouldnt be spam. Digests instead of multiple posts?
  As long as the bot(s) discriminate and segregate, they could really do some good work.
  
  I am really opposed to using bots to take popular news from Reddit and dump it in our main news subs. It's a poisoned chalice.
  In the 8 years I was on Reddit the quality of world news in the main worldnews sub dropped. In the last year I stopped contributing because there was no point.
  It used to be news from around the world. Sometime during the Trump/Anti Trump era it slowly got drowned out by the political agendas of various factions of paid shills and bots.
  If you look at it now, most of it is Ukraine war news. Basically the facebook crowd vote up what they feel comfortable with from the US news cycle, and the propaganda bots vote up anything that meets their agenda.
  I don't think we should let them set the agenda here too. Reproducing their selections would have that effect.

Agreed. I've seen some interesting posts, but I usually won't comment because it's just going to get spammed out by the next bot post.

- I believe that one is posting to dedicated subreddits, though? Easy to block if you're not interested.
  
  I blocked that account just now but I’d rather block the whole instance. It’s a neat idea but I see absolutely no reason for it to federate if it’s just an RSS aggregator.

I'd say they need curation.
There's thousands of posts getting botted over, but maybe five of those have useful content. Most of the time, the good stuff was in the comments. All that needs doing is a team going through what the bot posts and pruning the junk.
There have been some of those posts that were more than just links to a title on reddit. And there's the image posts like from r/funny where (despite me thinking they're dumb as hell) it is content that is forum neutral. So an outright no repost bots rule isn't any more ideal than them having no restrictions at all.
Like, best of legal advice, as an example. Useless bot because all it does is link back to legal advice posts without any of the comments from BOLA these made the sub entertaining. Stuff like that can go and nobody is missing out. But, stuff like r/art, the value is in the posts, so blanket banning that is a loss.
This needs manual curation like r/goodlongposts used to have until reddit pissed off the human that was doing the curation. Curation works for aggregation and reposts.
- I respectfully disagree. Curation is impossible with spam, since the moderators are the ones who currently sets up the spambots, and so they will turn a blind eye to it just so their community can grow. Allowing bot posts is too ripe for abuse, which is why I think the repost bots (again, not all bots) should be banned altogether with extreme prejudice.
  There's no reason that the good stuff should only be in the comments, I don't want to end up in a situation where the only way to make things usable here is to block the biggest communities.

Agree, flooding is an existential danger for social media.
As a side note, they're doing a good job of burning it down on their own, let's leave them at it and focus on building something good.

Strongly disagree. And I don"t think that this has anything to do with Reddit in particular.
The Fediverse is designed to host many different types of content. Some content is going to be content that one person or another doesn't like.
And that is fine. Those people don't need to consume that content. They don't have to look at that content.
But they should not be trying to prevent other people from looking at that content.
In your case, it sounds like you got into a disagreement with the moderators of a Fediverse community over what content should be in that community. End of the day, their role is to make that call. You don't like it and cannot convince them, go make another community, and if users generally agree with you, they'll come to your community instead.

Yeah it I wanted Reddit I'd just go to Reddit. It's not like there's any engagement in those threads either ..

121 comments