EDIT: Thanks for your thoughts everyone. Lots of support for simply banning or flagging as a bot, and I’m going to add functionality for flagging as a reposter, then letting people filter on it. Instance admins can apply whatever response they prefer.
Recently there have started to be a few accounts that seem to be used by a person for writing comments while also being used by scripts to automatically repost content from Reddit and possibly elsewhere. This doesn’t cleanly fit into our existing tools for classifying accounts and posts - a conventional bot might post RSS articles or other automated content, and users can choose to filter based on that bot setting. These new types of accounts are different from that because they’re partly human and partly automated.
This causes a few problems:
-
there are cases where the reposted content is written in the first person. Like for example, a Reddit post might say here’s a photo of my cat, but when that post is automatically reposted into the Threadiverse by a reposter script, it can appear to us that the PyFed account owner is claiming the cat as their own. Yet that’s obviously not the case, which gives an inauthentic feel to the environment.
-
sometimes some of the material being reposted is content that violates the rules and norms of Threadiverse. And so we see a lot of strange culture war stuff and racist content coming through sometimes.
-
a lot of people left reddit to get away from all the astroturfing and bots and LLMs running amok so letting that happen here too will just drive those people away.
Despite this, their content is often quite popular and many people upvote it and comment on it. Many people seem totally ok with it.
Before I change anything, it’d be really good to understand what the community wants to happen in response to this. I’m considering several possible approaches, including doing nothing, or introducing a new automated / reposted indicator for accounts (with a feed filter, separate from the bot indicator and filter), or continuing to apply the existing bot label onto those accounts, or restricting those kind of accounts completely. But I’m not going to propose a particular outcome yet. I’d like to hear what, if any, problems people are experiencing from these accounts and what information or controls would be useful.
Bots help “run” the account so they should be marked as bots. No inbetween.
I wouldn’t mind the reposters if they’d actually stay in the post and engage the community and comments, but when I take a look OP is nowhere to be seen. As long as they’re engaging in their reposts and it’s clear (maybe in the title or flair) that it’s not their content, I’m okay with them getting conversations going.
If the majority of someone’s post are reposts of recent Reddit content it should be marked as a repost bot so people can choose if they want to engage with the content or not.
I think I agree. If an account is posting automated content from another source, it should be marked as a bot account. I don’t think it matters that it’s also posting human content. And I don’t think we need a halfy/halfy setting
If someone doesn’t want the account to be marked as a bot, they can use a separate account for their human content.
People specifically disable the bot posts if they don’t want to see that content. We shouldn’t allow some loophole to force the content into people’s feed.
I would like to preserve as much choice and individual agency as possible. Blanket solutions like banning limits people’s choices.
I didn’t suggest bans.
I know, I was agreeing with you. By making an account as a reposter instead of banning them we’d be preserving choice and agency.
Banning is the most upvoted response https://piefed.social/post/2410016#comment_13025556 so it’s where a lot of people’s minds go to.
Banning is useless because they would just create new accounts or reactivate old accounts to start the same behavior on.
Meh, perhaps but most likely they’ll never notice or care because PieFed is tiny compared to Lemmy. I’m not seeking a universal solution, just good enough for here and now.
Ban evasion is one of those problems that federation makes extra hard to solve. https://fires.fedimod.org/ has been on my backburner / research list for a long time…
It would be really nice to have a third option like you are talking about because I do allow the bots to have the transparent posts but being able to completely remove reposting semi-bots would make my feed nicer.
I know I can block them but it seems they pop up with new names constantly.
That’s true for just about any account that gets banned for whatever reason. Yet most platforms still ban. And for good reason. Even a minor annoyance/stop gap is better than doing nothing about accounts that show unwanted behaviour.
Quite a few people have seem to arrived at lemmy after receiving bans. It’s at least a little effective to have moved those here
Hi Rimu
I use a bot account on my lemmy instance that posts to two local communities. The account is labeled as a bot, although I will occasionally post from it and comment with it. All this is mentioned in the bot’s account bio.
This is quite contrary to to what you link to though.
I think any account the posts other’s stuff as OC suck ass, more so if it is a bot that the owner pretends is not a bot.
I’m not sure of the best way to tackle this though - just giving a little context
[edit] This bot acc is reading News RSS feeds not random Redshit content.
[edit 2] I also remove content it gets wrong - so is semi curatedThats a thoughtful way to do things; thanks for the care you put into how you engage with this space, it’s appreciated ☺️
I have mixed feelings about this issue.
On one hand, what you’re saying makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, some of my fave posts are from reposters, like BilSabab on !smorgasbordbizarre@lemmy.world, LadyButterfly on !nicememes@sopuli.xyz (and others), neuracnu on !trailers@lemmy.blahaj.zone, and m_f on !garfield@lemmy.world. In the first two cases there’s a fair amount of curation, but in the second two cases less so.
So I guess my concern is that “restricting those kind of accounts completely” too enthusiastically might zap my fave reposters.
Hmm most of those had not come to my attention, until now.
I guess not all reposters are equal! That’s part of what makes this so tricky. These days anyone can throw together a vibe-coded script that does whatever they want so the variety and quantity of these accounts will probably grow.
I think this really needs to be up to community mods. As Sergio said, for some communities some kind of automation or semi-automation can be positive.
I also think any software solution from your side should be purely informative. But the first challenge is how to correctly identify the behavior and the second how to share the information without incentivising witch hunts.
I would say that there is a difference between someone that posts/reposts curated content (each post is manually selected), and an automated account that posts blindly.
One or more of the accounts in your list fall under the first category I believe?
This behavior mostly doesn’t bother me personally, but I do see folks being irritated when they realize the person they want to talk to isn’t the poster receiving the notifications. The best solution is what we have for bluesky via brid.gy – a relay that syncs posts and comments bidirectionally across Reddit and PieFed, but I suspect Reddit would charge you quite a lot of money to operate that, and a lot of instances would end up defederating from the relay anyway because they don’t want their posts and comments to end up synced to corporate social media.
Maybe instead we could add the equivalent of a referrer field, call it “origin” or something? If the user is shoveling content from reddit, they can set it to reddit.com; if it’s coming from instagram, they can set it to instagram.com. Possibly even the url of the originating thread? Idk. But then you can visually distinguish things that are um… manually federated? from those that are organically posted in the UI.
Remember this scripted activity & content is coming from Lemmy so there is nothing we can do on the origin side of it. Also the people operating these accounts are not keen on voluntarily labelling themselves as reposters - they want to be seen as normal accounts.
So whatever changes we make can not rely on changes or cooperation from the script operators.
I think PieFed should only provide labeling and tooling for mixed accounts that originate from PieFed instances. I think admins of individual instances can decide whether they think these are bots that are improperly identifying themselves or not at the instance level, and that the tools that exist for admins to act on instances that don’t properly identify bots are sufficient.
Would be a waste. Reddit would probably ban it hastily. And personally I don’t want my comments on Reddit.
Brid.gy works by being opt-in — you have to follow the bridge for your posts to be synced — so that’s how they get around the “personally I don’t want my comments bridged” problem. I definitely agree that Reddit would probably ban it, and if they didn’t, the amount of money they would charge would be much better invested in other fedi projects.
They should be marked as bots so that people who don’t want to see word for word reposts can filter them out.
sometimes-bot is still a bot in my books
All the re-posts definitely take away a good amount of fun for me. I’d like to connect to people and read original content, not ruminate on people’s Reddit memes from a week ago?! It is popular to do it, though. But at a minimum, we should avoid this place becoming some sort of bot dumpster.
So we should definitely try to discourage this kind of behaviour. Proper way would be to ask them to use separate accounts for their genuine(?) content and bot activity. So the automatisms work out. If they can’t be bothered to play by the rules and agreements here, they should be gone.
People are causing confusion when using account to both repost messages, which are sometimes written in the first person, and writing their own posts in the first person.
It seems fair to label them as bot or similar if the amount of (presumably automatic) reposts cross a threshold. It would be nice to make it possible to remove the label after they stop mixing both activities within the same account.
If the platform is too accomodating with accounts that mix artificial and human content, expect bots and LLMs account to abuse the rules and claim they are partially human curated. It’s going to be impossible to verify and a nightmare to moderate.
And we already got that. “I’m using AI (just) for translation” is one of the excuses I keep reading. And I have a hunch some people prompted their “AI agents” to say that, because their post will be promoting some vibe-coded stuff and their comments are filled with ChatGPT-isms. It’s really a nightmare for mods who want to do the right thing.
And I second people re-posting blog posts and quoting the first-person speech without making it clear it’s a quote. Always makes it seem we have zero original content here, just pull in some from other people. But we do have original content. It’s just far and in between and we need to come up with a way to make it more prominent.
Low level curated stuff is tolerable. And i am not totally bothered about replying human or bot if a relevant or interesting post.
But the issue is volume and noise. A label would help me with sorting visually and practically. Something as simple as ‘non human’
I hate the idea of this place just becoming a Reddit redirect, Personally i find it scummy behavior posting it. We left there for a reason. Do people actually like reddit reposts?
I feel this place needs space to grow define its own identity without a fifth column of reddit.
Before I change anything, it’d be really good to understand what the community wants to happen in response to this.
Spank 'em
If they agree to mark their content as not original content in some way -> mark as bot
If they don’t -> banThe tagging thing is what appeals to me atm.
They should be marked as bots so people can choose to filter them out, or not. If someone wants their human content to be fairly represented, they can use a separate account for the bot activity.
If I see human-like comments from a bot account, I’ll assume it’s an LLM that’s posting. I would prefer to keep the distinction and not have the provenance of content be more ambiguous than it already is. A human operator of a bot account should create a separate account to use as their account for commenting. Bot comments should only be auto-generated comments like the acronym-bot etc.
Is this a Piefed.social question, or Piefed (the software) question? If it’s the latter, I think any tools that allow administrators to identify bots/bot-like accounts are useful. If it’s the former, I say ban 'em all and keep the instance authentic (while acknowledging that my account is from elsewhere).
For now it’s The Software and I plan to do a follow-up poll for piefed.social.
