What are your thoughts on bots reposting links to Reddit posts?

The main thing driving my enjoyment of Lemmy is the people and real responses. Having bots just copy and paste existing posts from Reddit with no human behind the post isn't driving engagement. I haven't seen a single reddit repost by a bot get a single comment or community interaction at all.

I'm against it, it feels like a garbage in garbage out type of situation.

There's a lemmy community I used to be subbed to with a mod that decided to grab every recent and new post from /r/ and repost here. No comments on 4 of 5 posts, and one or two on the remaining 1 of 5. New posts every 3 to 5 minutes. Many readers thought it was a bot, and on a meta post in the sub, a different mod said they aren't a bot, they're doing a great job, and we should block the mod.

Did that and unsubbed. Now my "new" feed isn't full of reposted, zero-engagement posts.
- Yes, when I see my feed have 5 or 6 posts in a row from the same poster within a few minutes and with no discussion, not even an initial comment or indication as to why someone thought it worth posting, I block that person...
  
  When the same article is posted to, for example, any Lemmy community on any instance with the word 'news' in it, that duplication grinds my gears.
  
  Now that I've been here a bit, I realise that it's the discussion that is way better than the post, (normally) and there's no faking that (yes, yes, chatgpt etc etc, but no, pleeeease).

I’m not in favor of it at all. If a human user wants to link to something interesting/relevant, fine, but I’m not excited about bots spamming links.

That bot is an absolute menace. Often I come across a thread that would probably interest me, then I see 0 comments and the standard bot message and move on.

It also feels like it is really spamming those threads, which does not help the situation.

Personally, I would love to see it removed.
- Highly recommend just blocking the bot you're referring to.

Harmful. It's noise pollution. It dilutes human contribution and makes it harder to engage with other people.

Yeah, at least if it's everything. I don't necessarily mind if content from Reddit is being recycled to here, as long as it's sparingly selected. By a human or maybe by a bot if the content passes through certain thresholds (X amount of upvotes or something, idk).
- I say allow it if it can be opted out. Having a 'repost' or 'bot' tag, and a filter would solve it for me.
  But it might be a lot of work to implement.

I don't like them.

Pointless spam. If you're going to dig content from somewhere, maybe pick someplace we haven't all already been.

I fucking hate it and I wish it would stop, links to literally anything other than Reddit, if I wanted to open Reddit all the time I would just reinstall Reddit.

in your profile/settings you can turn off to see bot posts.

I think every bot that fills a place with cheap stolen content is more there to have some content for new people that they dont feel lost.
So i think they are good until there is enough content and then i think it would be okay to repost the top of the week every week.
- I'm fine with repost bots that actually REPOST.
  
  If it's literally just a title and a link to Reddit with to copy/paste in the text field or anything then it's trash and it's completely useless.

one thing that I've noticed the last week when using Lemmy is that content is slowly coming along but the discussions are somewhat lacking.

Reddit offers a shitload of topics and content but the real reason we were there was for the comments and the discussions.

Bots reposting material can be a way to artificially secure the constant flow of topics but we need to throw some gasoline on the discussion bonfire....

When 90% of the comments are sarcastic or jokes like Reddit I can't call that discussion or engaging. It's noise just like all of the reposts and duplicate content.

I've been on kbin (the fediverse) for over a week and I feel the opposite of your sentiment. The content was lacking but discussion is A+. Content is definitely picking up steam now, but I don't want the fediverse to be a reddit clone.
- Reddit has really become overrun with the garbage comments in recent years.
  
  It's like all of the sudden everyone decided they were a comedian and reddit threads were the place to test their new material.
  
  It really has been a huge piece of what's been killing the appeal for me recently.
I'm hoping it will happen naturally. I am inclined to think those of us who left reddit early are less lurkers than the users who will leave later. That means most of the users who left reddit early in the blackout are the more active users. Still, we need to double down on our activity to get things going here. It reminds me of a message on mastodon when the twitter exodus happened. There was encouragement to comment on toots, even if it was something small, just to make the OPs feel they were being heard/read. We should strive for the same here, specially considering there might be another wave of users coming this way after the 30th.
I've been making a conscious effort to reply to posts I find interesting, even if I'm just adding a sentence or two and not the most engaging of content. At least it helps get things started, I think.

My problem is that I'm experiencing a bug wherein I don't get notifications when people reply to me unless they @ me, so I can only see if somebody has by going back and looking at my own comments through my profile. I assume that'll eventually be fixed, but if others are experiencing the same bug, that will be a huge drag on discussion.

I've left subs that seem to be largely a bot reposting Reddit content. The posts seem to get no comments and it all feels a bit empty and soulless. Plus, if we want to be something other than a straight Reddit clone then copying Reddit posts over here doesn't seem the way to do it.

I'm worried that people think I'm a bot because I like to post articles and don't get much discussion usually.

I'm not sourcing them from reddit though.
- Yeah, I have that fear so have been throttling back my posting. I wouldn't worry as the examples I am thinking of are pretty obvious like [email protected]. That instance has a community where you can request communities and a bot starts them. At least in this case, there is a bot that just imports the posts from the relevant sub.
- We're on to you!!

No thanks. I left Reddit for a reason.

I think it might be okay in the early stages of a community when they're trying to grow a user base, "build it and they will come" sort of thing. But spamming more content than the community can keep up with is just annoying. I think they should be tweaked to only post a certain number of times per day so there's a chance to get some meaningful engagement on each thread.

I think the best solution would be to have an API affordance for it. Have some sort of historical boolean field that lets you import the content but keeps it from showing up in feeds.

That's way you can move your community's history over to a new home without drowning out other content

There's no reason to comment on a conversational post where the OP doesn't exist

I hate it. Rather than filling this place up with junk, we should have users post what they want to post.

Doesn’t even have to be original, really; just…no botspam.

i don't think they're good

I block every repost bot I find. I don't care about reddit's content. If I wanted that, I'd go there. Create content for the community here, not just noise. Most bot posts don't even get any engagement because their posts are soulless.

@CthulhuDreamer I don’t like it personally. It just gives more traffic to Reddit

They are bad content. If I wanted the garbage hose from reddit, I would have just stayed on reddit, but I don't.

My vote is on an instance level ban on all reddit repost bots.

you can turn off that you see pot posts in your profile/settings

I dont think that those bots will be as dominant as now in the future when more community content comes in. When that time comes i think even the mods know that they getting more and more obsolete
- Ok, Now Lemmy Explain:
  
  Suppose that the bot was temporary, as you say, then why would anybody bother making original content here when the bot is just going to drown them out? At what level of "community content" is this thing going to be stopped?
  
  In time, it would just get more and more entrenched as nobody would actually be making real original content here. It's like a drug addiction, we will be dependent on the bot to feed us from reddit, and it will prolong the life of reddit indefinitely like a parasite.
  
  We like Lemmy because the people and community here are thoughtful and kind, unlike the horrible discourse at reddit, but how do you know that bringing the reddit directly here would not make people become spiteful and argumentative redditors again? When will we stop being redditors?
  
  Suppose the reddit migration on July 1st does happen, do you think they would be impressed that they left reddit only to find the new place to be exactly like reddit but with less activity? No, they will all just go back to that burning house, and all of this will have been for nothing.
  
  I'm sorry that I'm getting emotional about this, but this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
- Temporary solutions NEVER stay temporary. Better to rip off the band-aid now before it takes root.

I don't like the idea. But if it is going to happen it shouldn't be a bot alone, but an instance that only connects to reddit content, e.g it would virtually federate reddit as a virtual instance. That way people would need to explicitly subscribe to the subs otherwise you wouldn't see it at all.

Lemmit.online already exists, and it was defederated from lemmy.world. No reason to have that again.

As a developer of one of those bots, this depends on the types of posts. The bots like the World News bot that repost enough articles to provide content without saturating the community don't cause problems and fit the purpose of a link aggregator. Bots reposting content that are meant to be engaged with directly, are missing context or are being posted too frequently for the local community to engage with are annoying. My bot is a high-volume poster like lemmit.online and I treat it like an read-only feed instead of something that is supposed to be a substitute for a real community, so it sits alone on its own instance and doesn't try to hide the fact that it's a reposting bot.

I'm not super keen on repost bots. Lemmy doesn't need to have what reddit has, it just needs to be a good content aggregator.

Reposting from Reddit doesn't bring anything new to the table and just sends people back to reddit.

Side note but I'm not quite getting the comparison between bots on lemmy and OPs on Imgur. Imgur was initially created specifically to host images that people were going to post on Reddit because Reddit's ability to host images was basically non-existent. It wasn't originally supposed to be an alternative to Reddit, it was there to supplement Reddit.

Lemmy is a completely separate thing from Reddit. Similar to how Reddit isn't Digg, back when Digg did the same sort of "screw over the userbase" that Reddit is doing now.

Great, do it. I don't care where the content comes from, as long as it's interesting. I'd rather stay here than go back to reddit.

I made a bot to repost official announcements for a game I play. Ideally, a day will come where the company makes the announcements themselves on Lemmy and my bot is no longer needed, but until then, the owner of the sub has granted me permission to use my bot.

My bot makes about one or two posts per day. Other people in this thread have mentioned certain bots making posts every couple minutes, which many people would find quite excessive.

Eh, content is content.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the bots, I'd rather spend my time discussing things here are interested in, rather than something that nobody here really felt like adding.

I hate them and I've blocked every single one of those repost bots I've come across.

I feel like if the OP wanted the post on Lemmy, they'd have posted it on Lemmy. There is no benefit to puppeting reddit posts for anyone involved.

Some good quality posts, yes. All? No!

Not a fan, I've been blocking the repost bots when I see them

Surely people who want Reddit can go to Reddit and those who don't want it won't?

Seems to me that bots cloning Reddit into Lemmy would mainly be imposing Reddit stuff on people who don't want Reddit.

Good for this transitional phase.

Problem is, why would people comment on the issue on lemmy, instead of reddit?

I have mixed feelings towards the repost bots. I see no value in pure reposts from Reddit, but I also have no issue with them IF they only post on dedicated instances and mark the account it’s posting from as a bot. Those posts have no engagement and Reddit was already archived for posterity purposes.

I'd like to see a "bot feed" option, like a twitter feed of bot posts per sub that I can ignore if I want, or scroll through, but they should definitely be separate from human posts. Maybe if enough humans "boost" or upvote them they can get moved to the main feed, but that seems ripe for abuse, so maybe not.

You already have an option to disable posts from bots accounts in your settings.

It's senseless and annoying.

At the same level of importance than someone who posts obscenities and other "unique" oddities just to "troll".

I just subbed to different communities from an instance with this exact purpose, but then I'm in a personal instance, so I have my main account for lemmy stuff and one for random things when I'm bored. This way I just focus on my subbed communities and then when I have time I change to All and see posts from communities I cared about.

But this only works since I know which communities I want to have posts about, in large instances like lemmy.world would be very annoying to have all the spam which some subs can generate.

A bot that post one post a day or every other day to give new users something to interact with when first coming here is fine. It makes the communities not look like wastelands and gives new users something to get their barings on.

I feel similar to a bot reposting official announcement; it would be better with a human where the one doing it, but until one comes along that will do it, a bot can have that job.

When a bot starts posting 5+ posts a day, I do however feel it crossed a line.