this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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Hi all,

What's your opinion on the repost bot in the AITA community? From my perspective, it provides little to no value to cross post such content from another website.

First of all, AITA lives off the comments and if there aren't any, it's not really entertaining to read the posts.

Second, if someone hypothetically replied here, it would never reach the OP on reddit, so it's not meaningful to make the effort.

And last but not least, if there are sometimes dozens of reposts per hour here, it drowns any interesting original content on Lemmy.

So overall I guess it brings more harm than good.

PS: Originally I planned to post this in the AITA community directly but ironically it's locked down to "mods only". So there's not even a chance to have there any original content.

Regards, rbn

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[–] [email protected] 143 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hate repost bots, if you want to use one as a back-er-up-er-er it should post to a dedicated community intended to be an archive, not the main communities for a topic, they are practically spam and don't promote any conversation in the comments as people avoid commenting on something that has zero connection to the original poster of the question.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

a dedicated community intended to be an archive

That's the intention of lemmit.online, but it leaks. It should just be a stand alone instance not federated to anywhere else.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Disagree. If it's tagged as a bot account, you can ignore it. You can block the community, instance, individual bots.

While I don't like them, other people do. This isn't a community where staffers currate, it's a place of free federation. By joining Lemmy you agree to use your time to curate your own content.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Sure. Only this is not content - it's just spam.

I find it very hard to believe there's a single user that finds any value in reposting /r/AITA posts. Without the comments the questions have no value as content.

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Repost bots are universally dogshit and should be forbidden.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

News reposts can add value.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

Absolutely Fucking not, full stop. Not indiscriminately spamming everything posted on Reddit with no user interaction, it makes the fediverse look dead

If you wanna repost shit that’s fine, but not 10k posts at a fucking time

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Manual posts are fine. Not bot posts. If I wanted to see every news article, I'd just go to a news site or use an RSS reader. Not every news article needs commentary, and not every news article is interesting enough to warrant being posted here.

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago

Yeah not a fan of it for all of the reasons you stated.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I blocked the bot. No engagement with the AITH OP, which was half the fun

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[–] Angry_Maple 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think that that bot might actually be preventing the AITA community from growing. Yeah, it's easy enough to block the bot. I don't disagree with that at all.

The majority of new users may look at the community and see nothing but bot posts. I don't know about you, but if all I see on a community are bot posts, I tend to skip that community. I don't always care to go digging through numerous posts to see if it's worth it to block a bot. Doubly so, if there is so much bot posting that the normal posts are practically hidden. A new user may just assume that the community is intended for bots and just skip it altogether.

I don't care about AITA anymore to be honest, but too many bot posts can definitely hinder the growth of a community. I think that would be true for many communities.

Imo, it's a touch worse when the community is based on personal stories. No one will really benefit from voting/discussing. Instead, you're reading posts that someone else intended for another group on another website. There isn't really a lot of "community" that you can get with that. Short story readers group, I guess? The actual OP certainly won't get any of the input.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't even like the AITA subreddit. It's precisely that kind of validation that annoys me the most of a social community. In the case of /r/AITA, it's just so "on your face". People rarely will tell the truth about their topics, even when they do, why go so harsh about themselves? Why not ask "Am I wrong here?", "Am I committing a mistake?, "Will I regret this?" instead of a "Am I the asshole?". Don't you think very self-entitled people will come and tell you "fuck yes! YATA"?

Ah, anyway, no, bots that can crosspost from other communities shouldn't be allowed. We also shouldn't try to replicate every successful/popular community, especially if it's a toxic one.

[–] thelsim 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Not for AITA, but I once wrote a long emotional response to a relationship reddit repost without realizing it what it really was. Only after hitting send did I finally see. It really sucked because I thought I was helping the OP with some advice and comfort and felt like a huge idiot afterwards.
So, yea.. there's no real value in reposting these kinds of messages if you can't even reach out to the OP. And it just feels kind of scummy to be discussing these kinds of issues without the OP even being able to read along.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

Why repost the content here if you'll never reach the poster?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

I encourage stealing from these communities: aww, askhistorians

I discourage stealing from: any of the innumerable fake story subreddits.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

I'm not a fan of reposting AITA content. The fun is in the comments, which you don't get here.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In a word, asinine.

Who thought this would be a good idea? I also find the tendency of making shoddy subReddit replicas is bankrupt and devoid of imagination. It's like when the British pilgrims voyaged for weeks across the Atlantic into uncharted territory, only to found their new towns with the same fucking name as the place they just left.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I mostly agree with you, but Reddit has such unique and niche ideas that it's kinda hard not to use them.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You could probably just make a bot to generate AITA stories, they would be the same quality

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I blocked that whole community because of that bot. I kind of get the impulse, but it's swamping any attempt at useful discourse with layers of shit.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Block the lemmit.online bot and you’re good to go. The guy who created it, made it for personal use, and it’s not going anywhere. If it’s on your instance, that means somebody found it useful.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Disagree.

How own post doesn't say it's for personal use.

It's on every instance because everything is federated by default and everyone cries about censorship any time anything gets defederated even if it's 100% intentional no-value spam, as is the case here.

It's detrimental to lemmy for 2 reasons. Firstly it just clutters up the place, lots of posts with no interaction. Secondly it implies that being more reddit-like is the objective, which is simply not true.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

r/bestof style of community could work, where the stuff is curated reposts and not straight up garbage

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think the problem is a community full of bot reposts basically guarantees there will be no original content posted on Lemmy, which is what we really want.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think I like the idea. I've come across too many posts elsewhere that describe strategies for using AITA, JUSTNOMIL, etc., to get enough karma quickly to enable new alt accounts to post elsewhere on Reddit where minimum Karma scores are enforced. I don't want fake shit here even if that means we have less content.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Absolutely and these posts dont get much replies, why would I reply to a bot instead of OP. The bot wont reply and won't know anything about the original.

[–] gibbedygook 7 points 1 year ago

some bots are useful, e.g. in the news communities. For AITA, no because you don't get to respond to the actual OP

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I don't really get the appeal of AITA and other places like it. The whole constant complaining on the Internet thing is... what's a better word for "fuckin wack"? Like just touch grass.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I just block repost bots. It's funny how that sentence has different context now.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah for AITA in particular and for all the reasons you mentioned.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Most/all Reddit repost bots are bad imo

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm disappointed that no one responded to you with YTA or NTA.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

So I guess ESH?

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