Most postings on lemmy are simply Reddit “archive” bots. Why is this so prevalent?
Because people think “content” is what makes this kind of site great. In reality it’s discussion.
To be fair, it’s both. There is no discussion without content, so having some content helps to kickstart discussion. But excessive botspam just makes it look even emptier.
Yes you need content, but without the discussion the content is just a firehose of random garbage.
…and without content, there isn’t any discussion to start with.
like i said, i agree that healthy discussion is the best, but we need something to kickstart it.
Blocking the bots has really gone a long way to make my Lemmy experience more enjoyable.
Is it a matter of simply blocking the users that are bots?
Yeah that’s what I’ve been doing
Blocking is good option to improve individual experience, but a flood of low effort, spammy content from bots makes a very bad first impression on newcomers.
I just blocked the ones doing the reddit archiving. If a bot is annoying you just block it!
Theres an option in your profile settings to hide bot accounts
In what client? I’m on Memmy and there doesn’t seem to exist such an option
You’re double posting.
Its not in memmy its via the lemmy web ui
Double posting??? And thanks btw
Im guessing its the memmy bug where it doesn’t seem to post so you hit submit again and then both go through
Oh crap, well thanks!
If anything is going to kill lemmy it will be these low effort content bots. Just post after post of either reddit reposts no one is replying to or random news links no one is replying to. When I scroll lemmy at night before bed 90% of the content is garbage with no comments posted to it.
It makes me want to go back to reddit in spite of it all.
Lemmit is a scourge. They claim to be trying to “bootstrap” Lemmy by providing content but so much of it is questions with no responses (on Lemmy) or Imgur links to deleted images.
I honestly wish the major instances would ban repost bots. We don’t need to literally copy Reddit to Lemmy. It’s just polluting it.
We’re trying to build communities. A good way to do it is to have bots post content, so there’s stuff to see on our feeds.
It’s always a balancing act that doesn’t work for everybody. But the beauty here is that each individual can curate their own feed.
Edit: I misspoke, I’m not someone who actively uses of promotes bot use. I just remember people talking about this discussion previously and this was a justification used. OP asked a question, I provided an answer. It’s not MY answer, but it’s still one. Don’t shoot the messenger.
It rubs me the wrong way tbh, because it doesn’t feel authentic at all
That’s entirely understandable. That’s the thing, though. It’s hard to have a community grow on its own, organically, in these times. A large majority of users are rather passive, they don’t actively contribute by posting or commenting so much. If they don’t get enough content on a topic/community, they’ll forget it exists.
So, to build a community, you get a bot to “seed” it with content until enough people know it exists and contribute stuff themselves.
It’s weird and fucked and, unfortunately, it’s the world we live in now.
I disagree, it just leads to spam and people blocking the bots, and therefore the communities. I think things will grow organically at whatever speed. People have to realise this isn’t Reddit, and likely won’t ever be as big, and that it’s good that it won’t be.
