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where is an OK place to experiment with bots? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I used code from a github repo to make a lemmy repost bot from a reddit sub.

I tested it out, it seemed OK. So I let it run over night.

When I got back I found out it had been posting the same thing over and over again every few minutes. The account was banned for spam. But in the meantime it was very annoying to people. Also, there are a bunch of posts that can't be removed because it's impossible to remove federated stuff.

Is there a responsible way to test this stuff?

I don't want to make spam, be annoying, etc. I feel bad about the spam bot.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Technical problems aside, no one wants repost bots from Reddit. Nothing makes people unsubscribe faster from a sub than a ton of bot posts without comments.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I thought these bots would be useful to quickly steal and or crosspost the content. But crossposting is... imperfect, and the bots arr far more annoying than useful. Oof.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Ya I planned for it to be in a separate community from the native fediverse. Idea was to allow people to sub to the reddit repost if they wanted.

It is lucky that I did that because otherwise this oopsie spambot thing might have got the native community in trouble, people unsub, reported, banned etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How is that any different from organic posts without comments, though?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ideally posts and comments are somewhat in a relationship. For a community with little traffic, posts will occur scarcely, and few subscribers will add and read comments in their time.

If the community has few subscribers but many posts, any commented posts will be scrolled down so much that engagements stagnates.

So yes, you are right. If a small community has a single human poster who posts all the time without commenters engagement, it’s the same problem.

But a bot almost guarantees that any community it posts runs into that situation. You can’t automate human engagement.

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

And if you comment on a organic post, at least the original author is probably gonna read it. Engaging with a bot post is just wasted time typing something out that noone will ever read.