Yesterday I saw a post about a repost bot automating a feed from Reddit. That’s not what an RSS bot is, of course, you can RSS from all kinds of different places on the web, but after seeing that post I started to really look at the poster of things which show up in new and at certain times of day it is an overwhelming amount of RSS bots for things like Qatar state owned media Aljazeera and others.
Rimu is apparently working on a Piefed feature to filter them all out, but that can’t be consistent and I feel like it doesn’t really disinsensitivize them, either.
If it’s going to fill up the feeds then I think I’ll just downvote them every time regardless of content. Is that rude or am I justified on this?
I don’t think you can be considered rude by downvoting bots. They’re not alive, they’re just code.
Careful, there are kids here that have romantic relationships with that shit.
Hey, I’m 70!
The reddit ones are useless. Nobody interacts with them at all. It was worth a shot experimenting, but should be shut down as it’s just noise at this point.
Yep, it’s just unwanted spam at this point. Probably best to just block the bot account and move on.
Whoa, hold up, hold up.
Rimu is apparently working on a Piefed feature to filter them all out,
We’ve had the ability to filter them out for years.
RSS bots, like this one https://feddit.online/u/feed_bot are flagged as bots and both PF and Lemmy have filters for them. You can go to https://feddit.online/user/settings/filters and set ‘Posts by bots’ to ‘hide’ to get rid of them. Lemmy has an equivalent feature somewhere.
Maybe you don’t want RSS bot posts but do want other bot posts. In that case, each PieFed instance only has one RSS bot account so if you block it, all the RSS-generated posts from that instance will go away.
Afaik there are only three such bot accounts, https://feddit.online/u/feed_bot and https://feddit.online/u/feed_bot@crust.piefed.social (and https://feddit.online/u/rss@news.abolish.capital which is Lemmy bot) so block those and you’re done.
What will be new in PF v1.8 is the ability for admins to designate non-bots as ‘reposters’ which are accounts which use automated means to repost content from reddit while refusing to identify themselves as bots. Like this account - https://feddit.online/u/sanitation@lemmy.today (I’m not saying Jerry will designate that account as a reposter, just that I will on piefed.social). Users will be able to filter reposters just like they do bots, with a visibility controls that are independent of bots (rss-driven or otherwise).
The default setting for existing accounts will be ‘show reposter posts’ so for anything to change both an admin will need to label resposters AND individuals will need to opt in to filter labelled reposters.
Why would you downvote many times when you could block the community or poster instead and never see the posts? It’s so much easier and faster and more peaceful?
I don’t want anybody to have to see a fake post where engagement is wasted.
And I rarely if ever choose peace.
I downvote any and all bots I come across
