If a human posted every 5 min, got 0 upvotes for 20 posts straight, we would ban them for spam. If bots would limit themselves to posting once a day, or once a week, and only post the top-voted non-duplicate post of that timeframe, it would be a dramatic improvement. For once, we might actually see real-lemmy posts along side bot posts, instead of the community being exclusively bots (or 99% bot posts) or exclusively Lemmy users.

I would tell the bot creators myself, except I don’t know how to get in contact with them. Is there a consistent way to contact a bot creator?

  • cheeseburger@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I finally went into my Lemmy settings on a web browser and unchecked ‘Show Bot Accounts’ after months of tolerating bot posts. It has made a dramatic improvement to my feed.

    There were just too many, and some bot posts that have whole bot comment sections too; that was what put it over the top for me to block all bots.

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Those posts (or rather that ranking) is available already though as a sorting option, with timeframes for a day, week, month, year and all time (as well as 1, 6 and 12 hours). Why do you think a bot for this would be helpful?

    • jeffhykin@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Actually, that’s my point we CAN’T rank them.

      • on reddit for every 1 post there are 100 or 1000 lurkers voting/ranking the post
      • but on Lemmy: there are so many bot posts, that every 1 bot post has like 0.1 Lemmy users voting/ranking it

      It is totally impractical for us to correctly/effectively rank the absolute torrent of posts coming from reddit, and the result is that every high quality 1000-reddit-upvote post is surrounded by an ocean of straightup-spam 1-reddit-upvote posts.

      Real Lemmy posts in a community are completely drowned out by bot posts. I can’t even find real users posting in a community because there’s so many bot posts.

    • jeffhykin@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I feel like any reddit that asks questions should not have a Lemmy bot. Like I just saw a bot for r/whatisthis and I just can’t understand the logic. Who would EVER answer a question when the OP can’t even see the response. I didn’t want to rant about it, but really, how can we get in contact with the bot creators???

      Meanwhile, something as simple as calvin and hobbs clips are being manually posted on a daily schedule by a regular Lemmy user.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think your example is coming from the alien.top bots, but I do see some justifications for mirroring “self” posts:

        • Creation of an archive while Reddit still keeps the API minimally available.
        • Content for lurkers who don’t want to give traffic to Reddit but also are not necessarily interested in interacting with the posts.
        • (In the case of alien.top and fediverser instances in general) The idea that the content being available on Lemmy can ease the migration.