Opinions wanted: defederating with reddit repost bot instances - eviltoast

Update: so, the responses this far are almost universally that these bots have been blocked by users of the community. There is also a general disinterest in defederating, which is on brand.

You guys wanna do a poll or something or?

I’d like to lead my thoughts with a quote from the admins 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?

  • TexMexBazooka@lemm.eeOP
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    1 year ago

    Voyager on iPhone shits the bed when trying to open their user profile, zerobyte.monster is the one I haven’t been able to block yet

    • impiri@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I had the same experience. I had to use the lemm.ee default web interface to block the two repost bots.

    • Jordan Lund@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Huh, I went looking for it just now and can’t find it, so either I already blocked it or maybe lemmy.one already defederated from it? ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

      But yeah… bad administration needs defederation. Bad users need blocking/reporting.

      lemmy.world got a bunch of heat from defederating from hexbear pre-emptively, but it seems like that was the right call. Then they got ddossed after defederating from pirate communities. Not saying that’s CAUSATIVE, just “interesting”. ;)

      • TexMexBazooka@lemm.eeOP
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I don’t want to defed from hexbear or pirate communities though they’re fun