1y ago

Replicating reddit content from AITA

Hi all,

What's your opinion on the repost bot in the AITA community? From my perspective, it provides little to no value to cross post such content from another website.

First of all, AITA lives off the comments and if there aren't any, it's not really entertaining to read the posts.

Second, if someone hypothetically replied here, it would never reach the OP on reddit, so it's not meaningful to make the effort.

And last but not least, if there are sometimes dozens of reposts per hour here, it drowns any interesting original content on Lemmy.

So overall I guess it brings more harm than good.

PS: Originally I planned to post this in the AITA community directly but ironically it's locked down to "mods only". So there's not even a chance to have there any original content.

Regards, rbn

100 comments

Hate repost bots, if you want to use one as a back-er-up-er-er it should post to a dedicated community intended to be an archive, not the main communities for a topic, they are practically spam and don't promote any conversation in the comments as people avoid commenting on something that has zero connection to the original poster of the question.
- a dedicated community intended to be an archive
  That's the intention of lemmit.online, but it leaks. It should just be a stand alone instance not federated to anywhere else.
  
  Disagree. If it's tagged as a bot account, you can ignore it. You can block the community, instance, individual bots.
  While I don't like them, other people do. This isn't a community where staffers currate, it's a place of free federation. By joining Lemmy you agree to use your time to curate your own content.

Repost bots are universally dogshit and should be forbidden.
- News reposts can add value.
  
  Absolutely Fucking not, full stop. Not indiscriminately spamming everything posted on Reddit with no user interaction, it makes the fediverse look dead
  If you wanna repost shit that’s fine, but not 10k posts at a fucking time
  
  Manual posts are fine. Not bot posts. If I wanted to see every news article, I'd just go to a news site or use an RSS reader. Not every news article needs commentary, and not every news article is interesting enough to warrant being posted here.
- If the content feed is what's valuable and can be reposted to Lemmy, it gives people one less reason to stay on Reddit.
  
  No it doesn’t. Comments and engagement are what drives communities and the bots kill that. Someone pops in from Reddit, sees nothing but shit from Reddit? They’re gonna go back to Reddit. It’s fucking asinine.

AITA is one of the worst karmafarming subs to exist on Reddit. 4chan is more reliably truthful than that place.

Yeah not a fan of it for all of the reasons you stated.

I blocked the bot. No engagement with the AITH OP, which was half the fun
- Yeah I feel like these kinds of bots only make sense where what's valuable is the content feed (like r/EarthPorn), which can be stolen and put on Lemmy, and not the discussion, which gets lost.

I don't even like the AITA subreddit. It's precisely that kind of validation that annoys me the most of a social community. In the case of /r/AITA, it's just so "on your face". People rarely will tell the truth about their topics, even when they do, why go so harsh about themselves? Why not ask "Am I wrong here?", "Am I committing a mistake?, "Will I regret this?" instead of a "Am I the asshole?". Don't you think very self-entitled people will come and tell you "fuck yes! YATA"?
Ah, anyway, no, bots that can crosspost from other communities shouldn't be allowed. We also shouldn't try to replicate every successful/popular community, especially if it's a toxic one.

I think that that bot might actually be preventing the AITA community from growing. Yeah, it's easy enough to block the bot. I don't disagree with that at all.
The majority of new users may look at the community and see nothing but bot posts. I don't know about you, but if all I see on a community are bot posts, I tend to skip that community. I don't always care to go digging through numerous posts to see if it's worth it to block a bot. Doubly so, if there is so much bot posting that the normal posts are practically hidden. A new user may just assume that the community is intended for bots and just skip it altogether.
I don't care about AITA anymore to be honest, but too many bot posts can definitely hinder the growth of a community. I think that would be true for many communities.
Imo, it's a touch worse when the community is based on personal stories. No one will really benefit from voting/discussing. Instead, you're reading posts that someone else intended for another group on another website. There isn't really a lot of "community" that you can get with that. Short story readers group, I guess? The actual OP certainly won't get any of the input.
- I can't say it better!

Not for AITA, but I once wrote a long emotional response to a relationship reddit repost without realizing it what it really was. Only after hitting send did I finally see. It really sucked because I thought I was helping the OP with some advice and comfort and felt like a huge idiot afterwards.
So, yea.. there's no real value in reposting these kinds of messages if you can't even reach out to the OP. And it just feels kind of scummy to be discussing these kinds of issues without the OP even being able to read along.
- The bot should really be bidirectional. Like message the Reddit OP if there are replies here / respond to the original thread. But I don’t think Reddit would allow that
  
  No. The bot shouldn’t exist.
  
  No, reddit should be reddit and lemmy should be lemmy.
  
  Not if they found out

Why repost the content here if you'll never reach the poster?

I encourage stealing from these communities: aww, askhistorians
I discourage stealing from: any of the innumerable fake story subreddits.

I'm not a fan of reposting AITA content. The fun is in the comments, which you don't get here.

In a word, asinine.
Who thought this would be a good idea? I also find the tendency of making shoddy subReddit replicas is bankrupt and devoid of imagination. It's like when the British pilgrims voyaged for weeks across the Atlantic into uncharted territory, only to found their new towns with the same fucking name as the place they just left.
- I mostly agree with you, but Reddit has such unique and niche ideas that it's kinda hard not to use them.

You could probably just make a bot to generate AITA stories, they would be the same quality
- Let’s give it a shot. From GPT-4:
  Hey, Reddit, I need your judgment on a bizarre situation that happened last night. So, my buddies and I were having a late-night bonfire in my backyard, sharing some beers and good laughs. It was a typical evening until the unthinkable happened.
  Out of nowhere, blinding lights appeared in the sky, and we all saw this massive UFO hovering above us. We were absolutely terrified, frozen in shock. Then, these weird, short creatures with big heads and huge eyes emerged from the spacecraft.
  Here's where the controversy comes in: While my friends were panicking and trying to hide, I somehow mustered the courage to approach the aliens. They communicated with me telepathically and said they wanted to take me on board their ship to learn about human culture.
  Without consulting my friends, I decided to go with them! I mean, how often do you get the chance to represent all of humanity to extraterrestrial beings, right? So, I went on board, and we had some kind of intergalactic cultural exchange.
  Fast forward to this morning, they brought me back to my backyard, and my friends were furious with me. They said I abandoned them and left them to deal with the aliens alone. They claim they had a terrifying ordeal while I was up there having some sort of alien tea party.
  So, Reddit, AITA for leaving my friends behind during this bizarre alien abduction? Did I prioritize my own curiosity over their safety? Or should I be forgiven because, well, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?
  TL;DR: I left my terrified friends to have an intergalactic cultural exchange with aliens during an abduction. They're angry, but I thought it was a unique opportunity. AITA?

I agree, I think it does more harm than good.
A repost bot could provide some value if it's reposting say news articles or sports scores. Even then you would need to find a way to make sure the posts have some value and are not just spam. However if the purpose of the post was to provide some sort of advice to the OP, the repost is worthless.

I blocked that whole community because of that bot. I kind of get the impulse, but it's swamping any attempt at useful discourse with layers of shit.

Block the lemmit.online bot and you’re good to go. The guy who created it, made it for personal use, and it’s not going anywhere. If it’s on your instance, that means somebody found it useful.
- Disagree.
  How own post doesn't say it's for personal use.
  It's on every instance because everything is federated by default and everyone cries about censorship any time anything gets defederated even if it's 100% intentional no-value spam, as is the case here.
  It's detrimental to lemmy for 2 reasons. Firstly it just clutters up the place, lots of posts with no interaction. Secondly it implies that being more reddit-like is the objective, which is simply not true.
  
  You only federate (content/communites) with stuff that’s been subscribed to by your users or vice versa. Please don’t type out whole paragraphs of bullshit.
  Also if you want to read some stuff from the guy that created it instead of also saying random stuff about them:
  
  Everything is only federated if someone from your instance subscribed to the community. That's what they mean by "someone found it useful". Just block it. I blocked it months ago.
- Honest the god lemmit.online is the worst fucking thing to happen to Lemmy. It single-handedly makes every community look dead and flooded with bot posts
  
  It has its own communities. It doesn’t flood others. These communities are even requested by people on the instance lol. Also at the top of every post is describing where it’s from with a link and the original ops username.
  Moderation issues, missing admins, kbin moderation not federating and a bunch of others things are a lot worse things.
- Thanks, I did that now. Didn't realize so far that the entire instance is just about replicating reddit. So for me that should do the trick.

r/bestof style of community could work, where the stuff is curated reposts and not straight up garbage

I think the problem is a community full of bot reposts basically guarantees there will be no original content posted on Lemmy, which is what we really want.

I don't think I like the idea. I've come across too many posts elsewhere that describe strategies for using AITA, JUSTNOMIL, etc., to get enough karma quickly to enable new alt accounts to post elsewhere on Reddit where minimum Karma scores are enforced. I don't want fake shit here even if that means we have less content.
- Absolutely and these posts dont get much replies, why would I reply to a bot instead of OP. The bot wont reply and won't know anything about the original.

I just block repost bots. It's funny how that sentence has different context now.

I don't really get the appeal of AITA and other places like it. The whole constant complaining on the Internet thing is... what's a better word for "fuckin wack"? Like just touch grass.

Yeah for AITA in particular and for all the reasons you mentioned.

I'm disappointed that no one responded to you with YTA or NTA.
- So I guess ESH?

Most/all Reddit repost bots are bad imo

No thank you, AITA is a toxic guilty pleasure, that I want to seek out actively if I'm in the mood for it, not see it on my feed regularly. It is the worst kind of form social media can take. If I see it anywhere on the fediverse, I'd immediately block it.

I thought I wanted it but ended up blocking it because I didn't want to engage with the content.

It sucks.

I don’t mind bots in general, the HNs bot can be annoying but sometimes it has something. A ouldn’t mind a few art centered. But I was glad when I left AITA behind, it’s so toxic!
Is that .world? I must be defederated from it

I can see the obvious problems with a repost bot reposting things without contemplation but one thing I would like to point out is that the comments in the AITA threads are often not likely to reach OP anyway. They get into the thousands and OP doesn't read all of them, of course. I think they act more as a hypothetical discussion amongst the commenters, primarily. Which I think is really interesting on its own. I think discussing even hypothetically who would be at fault in such a scenario (especially considering many of these stories are obviously fake to begin with) has become the main point in the main attraction of the subreddit.
That said, I don't think we need bots. Not for that kind of thing. I feel like anyone can post hypothetical scenarios in many communities, and we'd get good discussions and insights.

I accept everything you say, but I am still subscribed to it and read it a lot, even gasp following the Reddit link to the replies. Someone help me please with my addiction.
- It’s all fake.
  There. Hopeful that fixed it for you.
  
  I’m afraid that does not help, fiction or non-fiction, it is all the same to me. It is amusing to try and spot the clear fakes, and to second guess the responses - will it be NTA or YTA?
  I probably need to go cold turkey.
  
  It doesn't matter that the AITA questions are fake. The responses are a fascinating insight into the minds of... people that frequent /r/AITA.

If it gets people to comment go for it commenting and posting would basically be voting with your feet people who are complaining are likely already generating content in technology science ect in those topics reddit reposts aren't necessary.

I think repost bots would be really good for QnA communities whose answers are relevant even after a while. Examples of such communities in my sphere would be r/askscience, r/cscareerquestions, etc. That would increase lemmy's use quite a lot imo.
- It's not really practical or possible to copy comments (answers) though... you just get the questions and answers on lemmy will never reach the original poster on reddit.
  
  Yeah fair enough. It would just become something like a wiki if it was done this way. I dunno how comfortable I am with lemmy having posts like these...
- It wouldn’t. Repost bots are a plague that drive off actual engagement

Repost bots can help siphon users from reddit and make it easier to transition.

100 comments