this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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sh.itjust.works Main Community

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Why does shitjustworks have so many bots? I see certain communities like this where brand new accounts just spam random images. I have a dozen new accounts blocked every day and it’s getting tedious.

What is their purpose?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago

Not a SJW user, but this seems like spam indeed.

LW went on a clean up operation a few days ago to ban spam bots, maybe it is needed here too

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I have wondered about these Blogspot repost accounts, too. Their posts seem harmless (?) but pointless and strange.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

There a preservation bot that posts the OG reddit posts but doesn't include any of responses that makes that post useful (build a PC, troubleshooting, etc)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's weird that it's always some Blogspot subdomain link

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Blogspot still exists? I haven't seen a blogspot site in years! If they're still around then Google must have bumped them way down in page rank. I guess that makes sense, since Google only pushes products and news sites now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah they're still around, although blogs in general seem to have gone the way of the dodo

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I've been thinking about blogging again. Not on blogspot, but I've been feeling that I need somewhere to write out my thoughts somewhere that isn't controlled by someone else, and isn't subject to the whims of whatever groupthink occurs on a given platform. I used to have a lot of them, but like most people, I gradually stopped using them as social media took over.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

To what end are they posting? What’s the endgame? To make their website show up higher on search results? Eventually posting advertisements? Poking around for bugs? Surely they’re earning no money from posting nonsense to the fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I made a list of them and mentioned them on the admin matrix chat last week, but I haven't had a response.

Link to the thread:

https://matrix.to/#/!ftaqqnpOePvPwZBnaO:matrix.org/$PvVj9J24fyy4mUtGRJPzroJbIwpO4HOvr6yec6VfZR4?via=matrix.org&via=chat.kaki87.net&via=data.haus

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

It comes with the territory of any instance with open registration.

But yeah, a lot of gambling site ad bots lately.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Tagged bots can be ignored using a checkbox in your settings fwiw

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Bots like that suck. :(

I don't know why people want to step in and break something people are running for free without every even glimpsing a profit for doing so.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

If you want a crackpot conspiracy theory: It's Spez paying for bots to ruin Lemmy. If he can't get rid of bots on his own platform, he can try to make the competition worse.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

"[X] Show Bot Accounts"?

Yes, you can uncheck it to ignore all bots. But then you also ignore useful bots like TL;DR, link converters and such.

It would be nice to have better control here, more fine granular. On the other hand, I'm not sure if we really need spammy bots like https://lemmit.online/u/bot and http://zerobytes.monster/u/bOt who mostly advertise for reddit.

Not only but also because, new lemmy users won't be aware how to control their settings, and be faced with an All-feed which consists of mostly bot posts with zero upvotes and zero comments. Then they leave and never come back.