I’ve blocked every obvious bot I encountered the first week I was here and now I hardly ever see any bot posts outside of a couple AI art communities, and they don’t seem to really spam so I’m okay with those (and I mean, bots posting bot made art is kinda cute).
You can turn off viewing bot accounts in jerboa at least.
I think Lemmy itself has an option to hide bot accounts somewhere in the profile options on the actual website (or at least the instances I’ve made an account on do; MMV), but it’s been forever since I looked in there, as I use Liftoff.
I see dozens of posts daily with titles that include the words “this is an automatic archive”. The link as often as not straight to a reddit post. Auto -deleting the post and banning the bot should be a simple matter, no? Also spam posting of old reddit porn with dead imgur links. All coming from a handful of accounts in clumps. This was never supposed to be a reddit mirror site, but someone sure is trying to make it one.
I mean just block them…
This is such a bad take. Lemmys barrier to entry is already staggering, from picking an instance, figuring out how what and where communities are, finding ones with any engagement and sorting through dead duplicates, filtering hexbear and tankies, to blocking out porn and other stuff you may find undesirable. With bots flooding communities, Lemmy sometimes feels like a shell left behind from other social networks. Just block them? Sure I can, and may succeed playing bot whack-a-mole, but not everyone will bother, and the discussion stifling effect bots are having will remain.
Lemmy is small but growing, and content bots have a place, but maybe that place should be gathered into a bot instance that can be content surfed at will and need not require manual blocking from every individual. All these quirks of Lemmy are stifling it.
Lemmy could go a mile with content and community tagging and grouping functionality. The fractured state of federation and bot infestation, if it’s to be a feature, needs fleshed out tools to easily moderate in an additive way, rather than manual filtering out. It needs to be useful and functional from account creation and improve with filter work, not start as a bot ridden fractured mess and get manageable after some filter work.
Aren’t there just like two big bots?
No, I have like 10 blocked.
Oh wow 10 blocks or just turning off bot accounts in your account options…
10 blocks. I strictly use Memmy, so I actually didn’t know you could do that on the website lmao.
Turning off bot accounts also blocks the useful bots like autotldr though.
Yeah ok but then just block the bots you don’t like or block the communitys.
That’s what they fucking did and you mocked them for it.
Autotldr can also go away. Clutter is clutter.
I don’t see how “block a user you dislike” is a bad take.
Good idea, thank you friend!
To some extent they can be useful
But yeah, I don’t need a one to one of reddit, if I wanted that I’d just be on reddit
Lemmit.online clogs my feed really bad. I wish there was an (open-source) way to block the whole instance
Block the user (bot) and you won’t see anything.
oh yea. wtf have i been thinking ive just been blocking the instances lmao
You can block instances?
Not really, it’s not officialy supported
Certain apps can. I use connect and it has this option.
Idk if this is an unpopular opinion. It might be a devisive one, but it’s far from unpopular.
Honestly I’m not sure where I stand with it. Sometimes I hate it, sometimes I don’t notice it, and other times I don’t care. I have blocked the lemmit bot however - before I did so, it felt like every other post I saw had many upvotes and no comments.
Basically if a post I’m interested in has comments, then I’ll read the comments and maybe even participate in them. But if it doesn’t I won’t. If I see a bot post too many things that never sees comments, I’ll block it so it doesn’t encroach on my feed and make it feel dead.
Yeah. We need conversations here. We need to generate our own content. Sometimes the reposting bots give us something to talk about, but I think 90% of them don’t get any conversation going.
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This is UNpopular opinion
Hey, this is supposed to be /unpopularopinion
Seems like it’s filling the same role as r/unpopularopinion perfectly then
If we’re being fair, I’m just parroting the exact same line that gets repeated whenever any unpopularopinion is actually pretty popular.
The unpopular opinion would be: due to having a far lower user base than reddit, bots fill a unique and necessary role on Lemmy that would be a thankless task for an actual user.
I’m witholding judgement, but I do think I’ve seen the same articles posted in several fediverse and it is getting old.
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Not an unpopular opinion. I don’t want to go to Reddit anymore.
You have the wrong community
Posts about x ruining lemmy are ruining lemmy.
Comments on posts about x ruining lemmy are ruining lemmy
Comments generate content. Content is ruining lemmy? Fascinating.
With you. All these single upvote posts with 0 comments. Ban them!
All new post views are full of them.
Pssh, if you think that’s bad, try tussling with the rape and pedo apologists inundating .world and the other popular instances. Which you can’t escape, because the popular instances overshadow every other. That’s a very quick way to lose your faith in humanity.
I must be doing something right, because I’m not seeing any of this shit.
You’re likely avoiding the news subs, and in that case, good on you, keep doing it. They’re horrible. I am legit trying to figure out why the apologists aren’t getting banned. There was one I saw last night arguing that it was unfair that Danny Masterson got 30 years for raping two women while some football star only got like 5 years for killing someone in a DUI, that Masterson should’ve got off easy too. It’s the dumbest, most petulant shit imaginable.
I am legit trying to figure out why the apologists aren’t getting banned
You know, I would like to know this too. I sure as hell don’t want to interact with those people.
The news communities are just terrible. I keep having to just block anything with “news” in it
That makes sense. News is a flaming shithole on reddit, and it’s no surprise it’d be the same here.
Same here, I see people upset about it, but I haven’t seen the offensive content at all
Fragmented communities are.
My front page has the same thing 10-15 times because they were cross posted to so many different instances.
I’ve reduced my Lemmy usage by probably 95% because of it. I scroll so much but get nowhere.
No matter what my sort options are.
Edit: which aren’t always bots, unfortunately. A ton of people see them from other communities and will post the same thing to theirs. Blocking bots does not help.
Nailed it.
That and this place being crazy crazy overwhelmingly progressive (not shade) is going to push people away. Seeing 4 or 5 of the same tankie posts in a row with little other content but politics is going to ensure nobody is able to find more sharable content.
this place being crazy crazy overwhelmingly progressive (not shade) is going to push people away.
This is a serious concern. As a moderate, I usually get fed-up with how lop-sided it is here pretty quickly.
When I first joined Lemmy, I was optimistic that there would be a good exchange of ideas and open discussions from differing viewpoints. Unfortunately, that only lasted until I found the Agora. At which point I realized I had just joined Survivor Lemmy, and was always wondering which instance was going to get voted off the island this week. I pretty much dropped my sh.itjust.works account after that.
It is amazing how toxic the environment can be towards people with differing political views. I can’t remember the last time I was here and didn’t see someone calling conservatives fascists or saying they should die. Also, it is pretty rare day when I see someone use the word communist here instead of the pejorative “tankie”. Definitely not the kind of environment to foster inclusion.
If there wasn’t such an emphasis on civility, anti-racism, anti-bigotry, and non-toxicity here then I wouldn’t expect anything and probably wouldn’t even notice, but with that emphasis it seems to stand out even more.
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.World
And yes, I know you can switch. Nobody outside of the most hardcore are going to deal with multiple instances, moving identity, etc.
If the situation doesn’t get better regarding how that works, either through community or tech, I’ll move back to Reddit eventually as will most of the folks who jumped on after the failed protest.
Communists and socialists are not progressive. Progressivism is a liberal ideology.
Whenever I see the same person reposting like that, I downvote all but whatever seems the highest voted or post in the most specific community. Reducing such spam is one of the values of the downvote IMO. Though unfortunately depending on where the community is hosted, the downvoting may or may not actually work.
I see it as little different from downvoting someone posting the same comment in a thread. They’re simply not contributing to making the site better and in fact are actively making it worse. I don’t mind a single cross post so that they can use both a smaller community and a bigger, more general one, but take issue when they’re posting to a dozen big communities (especially ones that most people are likely subscribed to anyway). To anyone who does this, I wag my finger at you.
To be honest I’ve been a little confused on the various posts just being links back to Reddit. Not sure what the benefit is for the poster?
I think the idea was to get some data into lemmy, to seed it from reddit. Seems to have run its course.
Have you considered unsubscribing from the fragments? Dramatically reduce your subs and you’ll have a much better time.
It’s all over my front page. Even the few that I am subscribed to, I kinda need to be because of the fragmentation. There are 3 main Android communities. If I only pick one, I miss news, but if I pick all 3, I get a ton of duplicate news.
Lemmy is flawed. They need to publish an update where Lemmy condenses these posts into one post with a drop down where you can open and choose which instance you want to view it from. Shouldn’t be hard, and to prevent any issues, allow the user to condense a certain time period. For example, allow me to condense all posts that are the same URL that were posted in the past 6 or 24 hours. Make the most popular post the “main” one, and have a drop down to view the other ones.
I know it’s possible because I used to have an extension to check if any URL I was currently on was posted to Reddit, and if it was, show me every single instance of it. It was useful to see exactly where the news article I was viewing was posted on, or the YouTube video, etc.
I had very high hopes for Lemmy, but the fact I’ve been here for a month before the Reddit API changes, I have seen the clusterfuck that Lemmy has become. There’s no way new users are going to even sign up when the front page is repost city.
The way i see it is that it is okay to miss some things. I only sub to one android community (lemdroid), one tech community (lemmy world), one privacy community, etc. I am okay with possibly missing the first post about a thing because of this. It helps a lot. Another thing i do is use thunder to sort by “top today” once a day on the all feed to see what everyone thinks is important.
This works for the individual (as long as they concede to knowing missing content). But if everyone does this it kinda destroys lemmy because you never get the critical mass of users in any one community to have meaningful discussion.
Which highlights the issue of your proposal for me, that I’m not concerned about missing “content” in the form of links. I don’t like missing out on conversations. But when they are fragmented as they are now with so few people in each, discussion ends up quite limited as well. If people just silence one or more “duplicate” communities to reduce the issue of repeat content then it ensures discussions remain fragmented as well.
I think one community becomes the dominate like on reddit and others offshoot due to mod differences, community rules, etc. As an example, i am not sure if anxdroid lemdroid is the largest community, but it is run by the r/android mods and i see no issue with how its run so that is the one i sub to. If i ever began to dislike it i might move to android lemmy ml or something.
Hopefully we see it mature this way, and eventually we some primary communities (per subject), with some smaller communities, and the tiny ones just being subsumed by the others.
Unrelated, but I don’t sub to lemdroid because it’s run by the same toxic moderators of the subreddit.
Just thought that might be useful info for anyone who didn’t know.
As the top mod of one of these Android communities, our comm on LW usually isn’t super heavy on the news front and I feel our content is generally pretty different than the others, and duplicate news posts happens pretty rarely.
