Asklemmy @lemmy.ml _jonatan_ @lemmy.world 2y ago

Do people think the reddit scraping bots are useful?

I feel like it just creates a potemkin village where we have communities filled with content that nobody interacts with or cares about.

26 comments

Scraping bots make lemmy seem like a cheap repost bothouse. I am here for actual human conversations!
- The only way that I think scraping bots are helpful would be for purely archivale purposes. I wish someone would create an Instance that scrapes old Reddit posts and information and posts that information solely on that instance. Scraping new content and posting it here to Lemmy is not even using Lemmy, we've just gone back to Reddit at that point.
- I’ve started to block anyone who I see just spamming mediocre articles into multiple communities.
- Hello fellow human, let's have a conversation
  
  For sure, let's talk it up, homie. What's the word on the street?
No, they are garbage. I block every single one I come across. Else Lemmy is nothing but an echo chamber.
- There is a block bots setting in the user settings as well, although it may also block useful ones.
Many of them just link back to reddit, no idea what's useful about that
Hate 'em and immediately disabled the option to view bot posts
as long as the amount of scraping is very limited, e.g. copying the top 3 posts of a subreddit daily, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal 🤔
- I could arguably see sharing a few choice posts each day, but it seems like it's always posts that have no votes or comments or interactions
All I want is an nsfw scraping bot. Only reason I still open Reddit. Lemmy's NSFW content is lacking

All the other bots that I see from lemm.it are useless imo
nope.
There’s a PCMR one I don’t mind because it just results in images of peoples builds in my feed. Another bot I appreciate is a HN bot over on derp.foo - mildly useful to have this stuff collected over here like it’s an RSS feed.

In short - they’re ok in sparing doses
I have already contributed my two cents on this before the exodus. If you tolerate these types of low effort bots here, you will kill the platform.

Nobody wants that shit.
no
It's a great question. I am missing certain content from the niche sub-reddits and trying hard not to fall back to Reddit.

Some of this 'reposting' will help the community to add comments/interaction but as you mention may turn this platform into a leech.

Either way people implementing Bots helps the moderation teams to some extent.
Depends on the posting frequency… some just fill up my feed, and I had to block them to see a better variety of content
I find them useless because you often lose the necessary title and post text that accompanied the image, plus you always lose the relevant discussion. This last bit is almost always the most engaging part of the post.

I suppose they could be useful in adult communities, or for memes and shitposting where titles and text are either redundant or useless.

All in all, I say we get rid of them.
Lemmy should not try to be a carbon copy of a 20 year-old VC-funded for-profit site with hundreds of millions of users. Lemmy should establish its own identity and play to its strengths.
It depends on the bot. That one on lemmit online is as dumb as rocks. The Boycott Reddit Bot is doing a decent-enough job of generating posts that people reply to.
I was following a few just to keep up with what cool things people were making. I think I unfollowed them now because reddit posts more often than lemmy and these dominated my feed and I still had no one to talk to about the post.
Makes me wish there was a site-wide feature to block instances.
This is a bit too close to discussing Reddit - we've had similar discussions over the past few weeks, so removing this under rule #4.

26 comments