Alien.top’s raison-d’etre is to create bots and repost things from Reddit.
The instance makes a bot with the same username as the poster from reddit, then makes a bot with the same username as all the commenters, and re-posts each comment.
Every alien.top user in this thread is a bot.
https://lemmy.ca/post/10599153?scrollToComments=true
I did a quick check, and it looks like 138 of the comments are bots.
I am here to express agreement with this.
I am sick of bots. I am sick of reddit. I am sick of reddit content being mirrored. If you want to read reddit comments go to reddit. Lemmy is not reddit, it should not aspire to be, and it is a unique and interesting place full of great conversations with quality users. Reddit is a wasteland, and I am tired of people trying to import it to our new space.
Good timing, I was planning to make a thread today to poll public opinion. Yes, I’m in complete agreement. I don’t see anyone here with a solid counterargument either.
Even when 0.19 is out I think these bots are a bad idea. The new users who are most likely to be confused by them, are also the least likely to figure out how to block an instance.
I’ve defederated us from them for now.
I second this.
I made a comment about it here
Bots need to:
- Have a targeted and specific purpose
- Be easy to block for anyone not interested
- Be limited in how many posts it can make in an hour.
I find our local sales bot really helpful, but to anyone who finds it annoying they can block the one user and move on. alien.top is hard and complicated to block, even moreso than lemmit.online
Agreed. Although I’m not a user of the sales bot, I think it provides value for others.
I’m in favor of this. I got tired of blocking communities from that instance and finally blocked the whole instance because it kept spamming my all feed with zombie threads.
Maybe for now, and re-enable federation when 0.19 is officially out and each user can block the instance if they want to?
EDIT: F#ck me for attempting to leave that as an individual preference I guess.
0.19 is not going to be the magical fix everybody is hoping it to be. Yeah, you’ll be able to block an instance from federating to your feed, but the posters from the instance will still show up.
Are these bots from alien.top posting outside of their instance?
And maybe an improvement to the instance blocking feature could be to add a toggle to also block users from that instance as well, not just the communities (per-instance setting).
Are these bots from alien.top posting outside of their instance?
Yes they are, and the “opt-out” procedure post 0.19 instance blocking feature would be to go to https://communick.news/c/communick_news_network, read the side bar and block the 18 (as of writing) domains from your feed, I dunno if there are more.
Just look at nba.space, style.land for example… there is no meaningful engagement to be had because all those sites are flooded with traffic reposted from Reddit.
Uhhh that’s bad then, and therefore I agree with the defederation.
Thanks for sharing, I added all these domains to my mobile app instance filter until 0.19 hits the server.
I had the same thought process as you did!
When I thought it was just people cloning their own accounts, I didn’t see why anyone was against it.
Once I saw that the bots weren’t made from a request duplicate made the the original user, and that they almost exclusively post outside of Alien.top, I was very against their existence.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !communick_news_network@communick.news
just saying that I to prefer solutions where the user just has more power to adjust these things.
I don’t disagree, but burdening the users, especially new ones, with all these common tasks will make Lemmy a pretty dismal place.
ah yes the great burden of freedom and control. Best to alleviate the common user of such drudgery. Seriously though for me I like the control to be at the bottom and then tools to simply. Like subscribing to block lists or such. I mean im someone who often does not use an ad-bloc but always uses no-script.
i would be way more content with those if majority of the posts werent actionable help requests
Yes, you can. Defederate youself from Alien.top by migrating onto a forum. And stay there.
Generates content and if I need to search for something I can do it here rather than Reddit
Nice to see 140 non toxic helpful comments.
They aren’t really comments, they are closer to pictures of comments.
Yeah I get it and understand how it works. It’s still amazing to me. Also I don’t know if you understand that the creator is trying to have communication get mirrored between Reddit/lemmy so they’re both contributing to each other.
Their bridge to post comments from Lemmy to Reddit is going to get banned from Reddit in the blink of an eye.
Yep, this project is pointless because reddit will absolutely not let it exist.
I am aware of what they have said their goal is, but it’s not how alien.top works.
It would also be one thing if a user opted in to have their own content mirrored, but it’s not a user-by-user basis.
Also, this is a discussion for those from Lemmy.ca, though I appreciate you voicing an opinion.
