Beyond ridiculous.

Honestly, yeah, please stop.

Immediate block

"I've got a great idea, I'll make a bot to duplicate posts from reddit to the fediverse! I wonder why no one else has thought of this? Oh well."

Every time there's an influx. :bangs_head_against_wall:

For me it's the doubling down defending themselves as they get banned from community after community. Like bro, have the tiniest modicum of self reflection please

Yeah, I typically just block them as well, it's so annoying.

I'm not gonna out the user since that would put this post in violation of one of the rules here, but it appears they've set up camp and created their own communities to botspam to. I DM'd the admin of their home instance but who knows if they'll see a problem with it.

Edit/Update: That spammer now appears to be banned on their home instance.

For me, it's the people that come here and feel the need to bring all of Reddit with them. Like, do they also bring their shitty exes and all their baggage on dates with their new SO?

And it's not like instances are largely (entirely?) volunteer run and rely on donations or admins footing the bill for hosting. Oh, wait. They are. 18,200+ posts (as of this comment) from a two month old account with the associated thumbnail images, each federated out to who knows how many other instances that store copies and local thumbnails is a pretty clear abuse of the platform. I'd also wager that the userbot in question isn't donating to their home instance, either.

I'm new, why is this bad? I've seen quite a few complaints about the lack of content here already

In short: it's low-engagement spam.

In longer form:

It's just blasted out via a bot and not posted organically. It makes scrolling by /new impossible because of all the noise. It's bad because it strips away any identity the Fediverse has and makes it a literal cheap copy of Reddit full of bot-reposted slop no one wants to engage with.

Instances are run by volunteers and rely on donations from users or in some cases the admins foot the bill entirely. It costs money to host Fediverse instances. Each sloppost from a repost bot takes up space in the database, consumes CPU resources sorting through it, bandwidth to federate it out, and takes up storage space with the local thumbnails. And that's just on the home instance where it originates. Add in the bandwidth to federate it out to who knows how many receiving instances which each also have to store it in the database and store the thumbnails.

It's just so much waste. And for what? It's just noise. Content for content's sake so someone can mindlessly scroll past stuff they'll never read.

If you feel this place lacks content, post something. Every time there's a new influx of users, some genius thinks "It's a lot quieter here than Reddit. I know! I'll write a script that reposts stuff from Reddit. People will love it! I can't believe no one has thought of this before! I'm so smart!"

If one wants that kind of slop, there are dedicated instances that do nothing but repost reddit garbage indiscriminately. alien.top and lemmit.online. Find an instance that federates with them (many instances de-federate from those because of the noise) or sign up there.

No one engages with automated bot content

Seeing this post really made me realize how much repost slop is on my Lemmy main page. I'm going to start blocking them when I see them too. If I wanted to see people's reddit slop, I'd just go to reddit.

To add to that, no one WANTS to engage with automated bot content. The entire point of social media is to be... social.

I saw your account is about the same age as mine. I started in .world and moved to dbzer0 within a year (so I've been on Lemmy for 3 years).

Lemmy today is no where near Lemmy 3 years ago. Repost bots aren't needed anymore. You could make the argument they were needed then but today, Lemmy has it's own culture, its own memes, its own communities, etc. a blind repost meme doesn't make sense anymore.

If you're tired of the same content, change your settings. I use top 6 hours new and it works perfect for me.

I think there’s a legit use case for this if it’s done carefully. A lot of people aren’t on Reddit because they want to be, they’re there because their communities are. When those communities are small or niche, there’s often nothing comparable elsewhere (yet!).

A mirror community can act as a bridge. It gives people a way to start using Lemmy or PieFed without feeling like they’re completely missing out. Migration isn’t instant, it’s gradual, and without some level of content to start with, people won’t stick around long enough to contribute.

I agree that simply blasting communities with everything from Reddit with no limits is the wrong approach. But I do feel that a more targeted, slower mirror for a specific community can help people transition over time and eventually build something independent.

I've seen it argued, specifically against Reddit reposts (bot or not), that becsuse this isn't Reddit, the original poster won't get the answers/insight. But I don't see why that matters. We can have a discussion here based on a topic started there independant of the original conversation. And maybe the person (when it's an actual person) reposting it simply has the same idea/question.

:bangs_head_against_wall:

Actually doesnt this raise scalability issues concern overall? Say if user count naturally increase x100 tomorrow.

People would still prefer reddit as those same posts would have more comments. It isn't like a complete bridge anyway.

A repost is different. If you read something on Reddit (or anywhere) and you want to talk about it, posting it here is fine.

But if you're just taking every post and posting it here, you probably don't actually care about all of them.

Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.

Technically speaking, yeah.

But the instances that run on donations are more likely to get donations to cover the growing hosting costs from a 100x increase in real users as opposed to one bot spammer spewing out 100+ user's worth of content each month. Ideally, that 100x increase won't be concentrated on a single instance and will be spread out among many instances.

While the amount of content from such an increase would be the same, the posting patterns are more organic from real users compared to the indiscriminate torrent coming from people running bots to repost everything from Reddit. That allows for a lot more granular management of resources.

This place isn’t a popularity contest. I don’t get why someone would need to do this, unless they’re planning on /hailcorporate pushing product placement or troll-farming political views. You can have a high post or comment count, but nobody cares.

I've been here since the API exodus in 2023 and have seen it enough times to know that it's typically someone coming in new from reddit, seeing that the feed of new stuff here has an endpoint and recharges slower, so they want to make a repost bot so there's more content. They'll never actually read that content, but they just want it so they have something to mindlessly scroll past. I don't think they're going for popularity contest, at least not primarily, anyway.

Giving them the benefit of doubt, I think they're just highly misguided.

I could totally be wrong. This is just based on my observations and the occasional post in c/Fediverse when some new user talks about how it feels inactive here and suggests reposting crap from Reddit. I also try to go with the most charitable explanation for behavior I see.

Huh. I can’t imagine being so desperate to scroll that you have to spam yourself.

Guess that just illustrates that social media addiction is a real problem. I've never found myself in that position, but every once in a while I'm reminded that it exists.

I block repost bots as a matter of principle, If I wanted to see the trash that's on reddit I would just go to reddit.

But won't you need to fetch the content that's posted on other instance in the end, even if distributed?

Yes

While the amount of content from such an increase would be the same, the posting patterns are more organic from real users compared to the indiscriminate torrent coming from people running bots to repost everything from Reddit. That allows for a lot more granular management of resources.

A ton of stuff on reddit is by ai bots. A lot of people here are trying to get away from reddit for various reasons, one of those is how fake it has become.

We want real people, real discussions, the individual not the forced algorithmic nonsense that reddit has come.

Like why be another reddit when reddit is no good anymore.