this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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All the content, none of the Spez? Or, is it better if Lemmy stays distinct?

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[–] airportline@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Please don't do this.

[–] atlasraven31@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

If I wanted to lurk Reddit, I would just do that. Better to stay your separate thing. It is nice to sometimes get news about the other side of the fence.

[–] ShoePaste@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

Nah. This is a fresh start. It's been less than a week and theres already so much more content. It'll grow soon enough. Especially with spez fucking around over there. We want og content here, not all the shit reposts that already plague reddit

[–] psysok@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

I would rather have content posted by humans. Lemmy doesn't need to be reddit anyway.

[–] tallwookie@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

eh, maybe wait until 0.18 rolls out across the fediverse before scraping reddit for content

[–] MothBookkeeper@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh? What's that going to do? I'm out of the loop.

[–] tallwookie@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

0.17.4 is what is used now and it has a number of issues - included the new/scrolling bug. 0.18 is supposed to fix that & other issues as well.

[–] toofarapart@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the community is much more important than just having more content. I would worry that by flooding Lemmy with Reddit's content without the community to support that content could drown everyone out.

[–] PotjiePig@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah I agree. I think being able to tweak a personalised scraper as an opt in service per community could work. Some subs just won't work for this, like askreddit and Eli5, but niche communities, news communities and information communities. I would be happy just seeing the top 2 or 3 posts of the day for some, and for world news for example, only the posts that pass a certain threshold of upvotes in a certain time or against the subs size, to make sure the real news pops up quick.

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

I'm not entirely against the idea, but also really don't want to turn the fediverse into the flood of content that is reddit. Maybe some kind of relative upvote filter based bot. Only posts that get some certain percentage of above average number for a given sub, get scraped.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

I've been beating this drum since I got on here.

Here's the software you would need to put it in a special instance: https://github.com/rileynull/RedditLemmyImporter

[–] hotdogcostanza@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

I think reposting content from reddit is fine, but we don't need a bot for it. I'd rather see individuals bring over specific posts they think are notable as opposed to automatically copying everything they've got.

[–] withersailor@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thoughts: Content is good atm. If it's spammy it'll get blocked. Or the instance de-federated. Is going to Reddit boosting reddit or draining it by using the content. Reddit has a lot of bad content that Lemmy is free of.

[–] atlasraven31@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

But I also liked the...(whispers) cosplay...

[–] Ivyymmy@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

It'd be a good idea to create an instance with different communities as someone said here for the kind of posts that people could contribute, no matter if reposts are made by people or by bots (in this case, posts need to be filtered by upvotes or upvotes ratio or manually selected), for example some posts I was referring to with my first comment were about some guides or wikis for certain apps, etc. Some important or interesting knowledge that won't be here and that would make people like me forced to rely on Reddit.

That's why I said just get the content of those posts and just give credits to the OP without just copying a link to redirect people to Reddit.

In fact, I wouldn't want this to be filled with Reddit spam posts as most of them are useless.

[–] Acetamide@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

In general, I really do not like this idea. Lemmy is Lemmy and should not, directly or indirectly, turn into Reddit.

A few comments, some of which have been touched on by others:

  • One of the reasons Reddit went to the new pricing was to prevent LLMs from scraping their content and using it for free. I don't think a bot like this would work for the same reason.

  • I personally don't want a duplicate of Reddit. I'd prefer this to be a new community that can do better.

  • One of the things that drove me away from Reddit (besides their horrible handling of 3PAs) was all the bot posts. If there were a way to make sure that bot accounts were identified as such, that would be perfect. Hell, I'd rather have zero bot posts than the current state of Reddit.

TLDR: I vote no.

[–] Targo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I think there's value to it. There's a ton of really important and helpful documentation on there for all kinds of fields, in the past couple days I've noticed some references I've had for tech issues and guitar repair are no longer accessible, for example. There's going to be a period where looking for help/answers online for certain issues is going to be a nightmare.

[–] gina@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I think it’s like breaking up with someone and then dedicating yourself to building a weird, soulless android version of your ex.

[–] Poiar@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

It'd be kind of nice to play catch up a bit with the, what, 18 years of content on Reddit

I know it might feel soulless, but having a constant stream of "pre-approved" content isn't the worst idea

[–] MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Nah. If you see something interesting just post the direct link to it instead of going through reddit. Lemmy is a content aggregator after all.

[–] MaxTepafray@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I think many would be more interested in a migration tool. A way of porting a subreddit's worth of content to lemmy and start off strong, as well as preserve what might be several subreddits getting nuked as damage control.

[–] GreasyTengu@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

You could dedicate a community to reddit reposts easy enough. If people want to see the stuff from reddit they can sub, if they would rather wash their hands of reddit they can ignore it or block it.

[–] fubo@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you wanna write code to do this ... I'd say skip the bot, write a gateway instead.

Back in the early days of email, there were lots of different email systems, not just the SMTP Internet email we use today. There was UUCP email with "bang paths", where your email address specified a list of servers that a message could be passed through to get to you. There were other networks like FidoNet and WWIVnet, that could send email to Internet email addresses through special "gateway" servers.

A gateway receives messages using one protocol or service, and retransmits or makes them available on another protocol or service.

For a little while in 1992, I had access to read Usenet posts only through a gateway that exported Usenet posts onto the Gopher system.

A gateway between Reddit and Lemmy would appear to Reddit as a web browser, scraping posts and comments; while appearing to Lemmy as a Lemmy instance that users could subscribe to, making each subreddit it scrapes available as a Lemmy community.

So a Lemmy user could subscribe to, say, !askreddit@reddittolemmy.com and see a fresh view of AskReddit. The server at reddittolemmy.com would not be a standard Lemmy server with users, but rather a custom gateway server that fetches data from Reddit and makes it available in the form of a Lemmy community.

(If Reddit were not being an asshole, a gateway could be an API client. But Reddit is being an asshole, so a gateway should probably be written as a scraper that accesses Reddit as if it were a normal user using a desktop Web browser.)

[–] Djokkum@rammy.site -1 points 1 year ago

I've been toying with this idea at well. I don't think it's a good idea to scrape all content. This could drown out the lemmy-original content, especially when large subreddits are concerned. Maybe an upvote threshold (Only scrape if more than X upvotes) would be a good idea.

I would also scrape only the post itself, not the comments. Best to have our own organic discussions here.

Finally it should be very clear that a bot is posting these things. Ideally the bot would also ensure it is not re-posting something that was already posted by a Lemmy users just a bit earlier.