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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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