It’s just blasted out via a bot and not posted organically. It makes scrolling by /new impossible because of all the noise. It’s bad because it strips away any identity the Fediverse has and makes it a literal cheap copy of Reddit full of bot-reposted slop no one wants to engage with.
Instances are run by volunteers and rely on donations from users or in some cases the admins foot the bill entirely. It costs money to host Fediverse instances. Each sloppost from a repost bot takes up space in the database, consumes CPU resources sorting through it, bandwidth to federate it out, and takes up storage space with the local thumbnails. And that’s just on the home instance where it originates. Add in the bandwidth to federate it out to who knows how many receiving instances which each also have to store it in the database and store the thumbnails.
It’s just so much waste. And for what? It’s just noise. Content for content’s sake so someone can mindlessly scroll past stuff they’ll never read.
If you feel this place lacks content, post something. Every time there’s a new influx of users, some genius thinks “It’s a lot quieter here than Reddit. I know! I’ll write a script that reposts stuff from Reddit. People will love it! I can’t believe no one has thought of this before! I’m so smart!”
If one wants that kind of slop, there are dedicated instances that do nothing but repost reddit garbage indiscriminately. alien.top and lemmit.online. Find an instance that federates with them (many instances de-federate from those because of the noise) or sign up there.
I think there’s a legit use case for this if it’s done carefully. A lot of people aren’t on Reddit because they want to be, they’re there because their communities are. When those communities are small or niche, there’s often nothing comparable elsewhere (yet!).
A mirror community can act as a bridge. It gives people a way to start using Lemmy or PieFed without feeling like they’re completely missing out. Migration isn’t instant, it’s gradual, and without some level of content to start with, people won’t stick around long enough to contribute.
I agree that simply blasting communities with everything from Reddit with no limits is the wrong approach. But I do feel that a more targeted, slower mirror for a specific community can help people transition over time and eventually build something independent.
I’ve seen it argued, specifically against Reddit reposts (bot or not), that becsuse this isn’t Reddit, the original poster won’t get the answers/insight. But I don’t see why that matters. We can have a discussion here based on a topic started there independant of the original conversation. And maybe the person (when it’s an actual person) reposting it simply has the same idea/question.
I saw your account is about the same age as mine. I started in .world and moved to dbzer0 within a year (so I’ve been on Lemmy for 3 years).
Lemmy today is no where near Lemmy 3 years ago. Repost bots aren’t needed anymore. You could make the argument they were needed then but today, Lemmy has it’s own culture, its own memes, its own communities, etc. a blind repost meme doesn’t make sense anymore.
If you’re tired of the same content, change your settings. I use top 6 hours new and it works perfect for me.
I’m new, why is this bad? I’ve seen quite a few complaints about the lack of content here already
In short: it’s low-engagement spam.
In longer form:
It’s just blasted out via a bot and not posted organically. It makes scrolling by /new impossible because of all the noise. It’s bad because it strips away any identity the Fediverse has and makes it a literal cheap copy of Reddit full of bot-reposted slop no one wants to engage with.
Instances are run by volunteers and rely on donations from users or in some cases the admins foot the bill entirely. It costs money to host Fediverse instances. Each sloppost from a repost bot takes up space in the database, consumes CPU resources sorting through it, bandwidth to federate it out, and takes up storage space with the local thumbnails. And that’s just on the home instance where it originates. Add in the bandwidth to federate it out to who knows how many receiving instances which each also have to store it in the database and store the thumbnails.
It’s just so much waste. And for what? It’s just noise. Content for content’s sake so someone can mindlessly scroll past stuff they’ll never read.
If you feel this place lacks content, post something. Every time there’s a new influx of users, some genius thinks “It’s a lot quieter here than Reddit. I know! I’ll write a script that reposts stuff from Reddit. People will love it! I can’t believe no one has thought of this before! I’m so smart!”
If one wants that kind of slop, there are dedicated instances that do nothing but repost reddit garbage indiscriminately. alien.top and lemmit.online. Find an instance that federates with them (many instances de-federate from those because of the noise) or sign up there.
I think there’s a legit use case for this if it’s done carefully. A lot of people aren’t on Reddit because they want to be, they’re there because their communities are. When those communities are small or niche, there’s often nothing comparable elsewhere (yet!).
A mirror community can act as a bridge. It gives people a way to start using Lemmy or PieFed without feeling like they’re completely missing out. Migration isn’t instant, it’s gradual, and without some level of content to start with, people won’t stick around long enough to contribute.
I agree that simply blasting communities with everything from Reddit with no limits is the wrong approach. But I do feel that a more targeted, slower mirror for a specific community can help people transition over time and eventually build something independent.
People would still prefer reddit as those same posts would have more comments. It isn’t like a complete bridge anyway.
No one engages with automated bot content
To add to that, no one WANTS to engage with automated bot content. The entire point of social media is to be… social.
I’ve seen it argued, specifically against Reddit reposts (bot or not), that becsuse this isn’t Reddit, the original poster won’t get the answers/insight. But I don’t see why that matters. We can have a discussion here based on a topic started there independant of the original conversation. And maybe the person (when it’s an actual person) reposting it simply has the same idea/question.
A repost is different. If you read something on Reddit (or anywhere) and you want to talk about it, posting it here is fine.
But if you’re just taking every post and posting it here, you probably don’t actually care about all of them.
I saw your account is about the same age as mine. I started in .world and moved to dbzer0 within a year (so I’ve been on Lemmy for 3 years).
Lemmy today is no where near Lemmy 3 years ago. Repost bots aren’t needed anymore. You could make the argument they were needed then but today, Lemmy has it’s own culture, its own memes, its own communities, etc. a blind repost meme doesn’t make sense anymore.
If you’re tired of the same content, change your settings. I use top 6 hours new and it works perfect for me.