Spyke

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asklemmy·Ask LemmybyHirohito

Do you block accounts that post with very high frequency?

Specifically the ones that post like bots but are not marked as bots.

The accounts that post into all sorts of comms including many they aren't a member of. The posts are usually pretty low quality and its clear the operator is not curating anything.

I find them annoying so I block. What do you think about it?

View original on fedinsfw.app
64

87 replies

considering this is coming from someone who stalked my post history just to reply to a comment from almost a week ago because a post of mine (from yesterday, no less) triggered them so much, and who also felt the need to announce they’d blocked Lemmy’s womensstuff community (https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/25340974), I’d say: good riddance. 🫶

3
velmareply
sh.itjust.works

Nah it's the stalking of violet's post history and the announcing of your departure that garnered my reaction.

2
discuss.tchncs.de

I wanted to make a decision on whether I did want to block violet or not so I took a look at the account history. This opportunity just seemed too serendipitous to avoid.

Keep culture war-ing away. X

-2

Yeah, I tend to block the sources that make me feel like I have to contribute to it. I don't think it's good for me.

0

That's fair! Everyone should do what's best for them insofar as they're not harming others :)

2
lemmy.world

I never block you, but I always tag you and your many alts with some variation of Definitely A Woman or something else that implies that I think you're probably a dude who gets off on horny posting as a woman.

-2

Yep. I'm not trying to see somebody just showing me the top 50 posts off their reddit feed day after day after day. That shit sure does numbers here though.

Ever had that reddit friend IRL who's just always showing you reddit stuff you already saw? That's who those are. They don't comment, they don't post oc, they never mix up their posts, it's a bot. Straight to the block bin.

20
sem
piefed.blahaj.zone

There's that one guy who keeps making accounts with the same cm00* username but different servers. I wish piefed/blorp could block accounts based on a regex , wildcard, or other filter.

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Hirohitoreply
fedinsfw.app

Yes and this operator does not seem to even read the content they repost. After they posted very low quality misleading items a few times, I blocked all of their accounts.

8
papalonianreply
lemmy.world

I'm pretty sure that they specifically repost things posted from .ml accounts. They aren't looking at the posts or hoping to farm "karma" or whatever, they're trying to de-populate the instance.

Can be pretty annoying when all the .ml posts line up with the cm00* posts.

5
Hirohitoreply
fedinsfw.app

Yes, the operator is very public about their goals. This doesn't make it any less annoying and by all measures it is not having the desired effect. I like that I can just block and make it all disappear.

4

It's absolutely having the desired effects, when I started I was needing to sift through 100-200 posts every morning when I start

Now its down to 30-40 and select comms I monitor increase in MAUs

1

Unfortunately I only know how to do it one by one but that works fine.

2

I’m not sure how come anyone would try to farm karma when Lemmy doesn’t have karma points of any kind.

2
cm0002reply
lemdro.id

Yea that's right

::: spoiler Why am I cross-posting .ml content?

I cross-post from .ml to the nearest relevant non-.ml comm to reduce the influence of .ml comms and indirectly, the instance as a whole, to help vitilize non-.ml comms and make it an easier decision for other instance admins to defederate because one key reason I identified that admins don't want to defederate is because .ml still has some very large comms and some active niche comms.

Megathread on the issue

Some highlights from the link:

Dessalines, head .ml admin, lead Lemmy dev actively spreading genocide denialism https://sh.itjust.works/post/61371958

.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558 The original transphobic Comment from Nutomic: https://lemmy.world/post/18236068

"If you don't support Russia then you just don't understand geopolitics" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415

"Don't worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167

"See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn't count!!" ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342

"NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035

General negative sentiment to other instances who haven't "seen the way" yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510

And so so much documentation on clear heavy handed censorship and bias also on the link. So much I can't even put them all here because this comment would be really long.

I believe the behavior of its admins (the main admins are Lemmy devs) does harm to the overall growth of the Lemmy-verse and maybe even the Thrediverse (since Lemmy kinda kicked off the Thrediverse) because of its association with the devs of Lemmy and their insistence to use .ml as their personal political platform to spread harmful propaganda

On the outside, bringing up Lemmy frequently leads to comments like "Lemmy? Isn't that the place with a bunch of tankies?" Or "Tried Lemmy, but found it full of pro Russia crap so I left". The best way forward from that I see is to either widely defederate from .ml like the rest of the Triad, or pressure them to put a fair and unbiased as possible admin team. :::

You could always just block .ml :)

1
semreply
piefed.blahaj.zone

I did not know the reason you did it; before today i thought it was just some kind of paranoia about always needing to register new accounts.

Have you ever put the context thing in your copied posts?

1
cm0002reply
lemdro.id

some kind of paranoia about always needing to register new accounts.

I mean, you're not entirely wrong, the multiple accounts is for a few different reasons, but one of them is defense against impersonation accounts which has happened to me lol

But the main reasons for the many instance accounts are kinda unrelated to the ml crossposting kinda are, they are

  1. Promoting smaller instances, because of the volume of my posting it helps makes smaller instances more recognizable
  2. Making comms on fitting smaller instances (e.g. a programming comm id make on programming.dev)
  3. Mitigating against the imposter problem
  4. Better interconnecting smaller instances

Have you ever put the context thing in your copied posts?

I've thought about it, but ultimately decided against it, I felt it would make the thread in whatever comm I'm posting it in too off-topic. So instead i just comment it whenever it's inquired about

2

Not sure why your comment didn't federate to my lemdro.id account lol

But it stands for Original Question By

1
papalonianreply
lemmy.world

I could, but for the very reasons you cite instances don't defederate from them, I don't. I block individuals that post bullshit I don't like, but my feed is already small as it is without purging a sizable amount of it.

1
cm0002reply
lemdro.id

Fair, but I can tell you that a lot of .ml comms only appear to be very large because they're one of the original instances so their comm subscriber counts are quite bloated with dead and deleted accounts (I don't think subscriber counts decrease for any reason other than you actually clicking the unsubscribe button on a comm)

If you take a look by MAUs (a much better metric to go by) the non.ml Threadiverse is actually very healthy

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active_month

1

My decision isn't based on metrics, just by how many .ml posts/comments I see that I know I wouldn't if I'd blocked the instance. I know a lot of crap comes from them, and I don't doubt they're problematic, but for the most part, the shitty posts and comments from them are down voted to hell so I never see them, or are from users I've already blocked.

1

I review each and every crosspost since it's all done manually, I only filter out propaganda (like the constant deluge of Russian propaganda on .ml) and spams/scams

Obviously I'm human so I make mistakes, it happens, but the point is you can have the freedom to actually call out and/or discuss such things on another instance without needing to worry about getting censored and/or banned by the .ml admin for doing so

2

Beep is another one like that. I don't block them specifically so I can call out their art theft, because they feed people's comics to AI to remove the watermark.

5

Context

::: spoiler Why am I cross-posting .ml content?

I cross-post from .ml to the nearest relevant non-.ml comm to reduce the influence of .ml comms and indirectly, the instance as a whole, to help vitilize non-.ml comms and make it an easier decision for other instance admins to defederate because one key reason I identified that admins don't want to defederate is because .ml still has some very large comms and some active niche comms.

Megathread on the issue

Some highlights from the link:

Dessalines, head .ml admin, lead Lemmy dev actively spreading genocide denialism https://sh.itjust.works/post/61371958

.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558 The original transphobic Comment from Nutomic: https://lemmy.world/post/18236068

"If you don't support Russia then you just don't understand geopolitics" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415

"Don't worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167

"See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn't count!!" ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342

"NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035

General negative sentiment to other instances who haven't "seen the way" yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510

And so so much documentation on clear heavy handed censorship and bias also on the link. So much I can't even put them all here because this comment would be really long.

I believe the behavior of its admins (the main admins are Lemmy devs) does harm to the overall growth of the Lemmy-verse and maybe even the Thrediverse (since Lemmy kinda kicked off the Thrediverse) because of its association with the devs of Lemmy and their insistence to use .ml as their personal political platform to spread harmful propaganda

On the outside, bringing up Lemmy frequently leads to comments like "Lemmy? Isn't that the place with a bunch of tankies?" Or "Tried Lemmy, but found it full of pro Russia crap so I left". The best way forward from that I see is to either widely defederate from .ml like the rest of the Triad, or pressure them to put a fair and unbiased as possible admin team. :::

2
quokk.au

I block posters and commenters I don't want to see. Its that simple.

I used to avoid it because I thought I'd create an echochamber, but I've come to realise that there's a few users with fixations about specific issues that just give me the shits honestly.

14

Someone once told me that blocking people to curate your feed was a valid use case and I've never looked back. I don't care too much about an echo chamber if I am removing people who are absolutely unhinged.

8

But how would you feel if a financially stable, but socially flawed, middle aged woman from the South, were to date a moderately financially stable, but socially accepted, young man from Singapore? What are your thoughts on that?

3

Certain new accounts come out of the gate posting to the same 5 or 6 groups before deleting themselves.

I get suspicious over every new account.

11

At least they are posting something and keeping the community active. We can't all be lurkers.

11

For the most part…no, I don’t. I’m still of the mindset that there’s not enough people posting across communities, so blocking accounts is an absolutely last resort for me personally.

That said, there is one account that I know of that I question if it’s really a person or a bot. I won’t say who. However, they post multiple times an hour across a lot of communities. (I even went to their profile once to see when there would be a sizable break/gap for when they should be sleeping and didn’t find a gap within a 24 hour window!) I actually removed myself from one community because the posting there became way too frequent. Elsewhere that same account posts relevant content, so that was a better balance for me.

TL;DR - Usually no, so long as they’re posting what I consider acceptable/decent quality content. I’m more likely to remove myself from one community than block an account to tone down the level of posts in my subscribed feed.

I definitely understand finding it annoying though.

Also, welcome to Lemmy!

11
fedia.io

I block them if (f * t - p - e) / q * r passes a certain threshold, where f is the frequency of posting, t is how annoyed I am by the general theme or topic of those posts, p is the cuteness of their profile pic, e is the amount of effort they put into each post, q is the overall quality of the posts, and r is a random number generated by my subconscious.

11
Sergioreply
piefed.social

r is a random number generated by my subconscious.

I think that's just called a "constant." Like: "Kbal's Constant". You don't have to explain it, it just is. You should probably come up with a Greek letter for it tho.

5

Doesn't constant imply unchanging? For this to work the formula would need to have a random variable times the constant, which seems to make calling it a constant miss the point.

3
lemmy.world

a random number

I think that's just called a "constant."

I think you need to brush up on the concepts of 'random' and 'constant'

2

The only account I've had to block so far is LadyButterfly. I'm usually against blocking people but I just couldn't take it anymore.

8
lemmy.world

I think I blocked a couple of accounts years ago that were just reposting ancient memes from reddit in bot-like numbers. But it seems like the majority of content here falls under that category, so blocking seems futile. Can't even use downvoting to correct the issue because our votes aren't private/anonymous here and I don't need a large account seeing that I downvote their content every time I come across it. It would have to feel personal at that point 😆

I don't mind big accounts in principle, I just don't want to see memes from 2018 being reposted every day with the same titles, and for there to be no other content from those accounts.

7

Can't even use downvoting to correct the issue because our votes aren't private/anonymous here and I don't need a large account seeing that I downvote their content every time I come across it. It would have to feel personal at that point

Downvote away, who cares if some massive account sees you don't like their content? Also, who spends that much time checking who does(n't) like what you post?

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't care past a basic up/down count. And even then, I've seen some of the shit that gets upvotes in certain comms, I'm not concerned with going against the hive mind on certain topics.

2

I've blocked 43 users and 6 communities, fediverse looks great now.

7

No, not consciously. However, I do block accounts that reply to me in a shitty or condescending way. Life's too short to deal with these people and I'll never meet them in real life. I've wasted far too much time engaging with arseholes over on Reddit, but since I've moved here I've been pleasantly surprised by the civility of most discourse. So that's why I block anyone wrecking my experience.

6

The accounts that post into all sorts of comms including many they aren't a member of. The posts are usually pretty low quality and its clear the operator is not curating anything.

They're probably not bots mostly, just people who choose to scroll the "All" feed instead of maintain a "Subscribed" feed. I don't roll that way myself, but I guess it allows you to see more content.

Like I'm sure there literally exists some user who secretly bots Lemmy, but why would anyone spend time and money botting our irrelevant little ass crack of the Internet?

6
lemmy.world

There's a fair few high volume posters who are definitely not bots, just terminally online (said with love!)

That's not to say there aren't bots that show up, but it's definitely not all the high volume accounts

I think the only ones I've blocked are mostly just obviously malicious, I think there's a one or two on there from ages ago I just found kinda unfunny, it's not really tied to the volume of posts.

There's not an endless amount of content here anyway, so I'm not gonna block someone just for contributing a lot, there needs to be some negative aspect to the posting for me to block

4

The ones I see who post multiple times per hour and never comment are quickly blocked by me. I prefer a smaller amount of thoughtful posts than a continuous blast of low effort posts with no engagement.

5

I don't block anyone but I do post frequently. I only ever get annoyed when someone is posting the same thing in multiple communities at the same time.

4

Sometimes. I like to interact with people who comment, but also with those who post those threads. If they post too much, they most likely don't have time to talk about it.

3

I don't block almost anyone, usually the egregious bot accounts get banned. I think I've blocked maybe 3 accounts.

3

Only a few obvious bots because they were filling up my feed. I like seeing posts from users, especially when it comes to news.

3

Sometimes. I tend to do it when the posts are all low quality or I have seen them reposted a lot. Haven't done this since I switched from Reddit to Lemmy, though.

2
programming.dev

The other day I read a comment that says you can automatically filter out users wo post with high frequency. Is that true, does anyone know how? I've only looked at the settings through Boost.

2

I would also like to know how to do that. As far as I can tell that is not currently possible on any of the Threadiverse platforms.

2

It depends on what the account is posting prolifically. For example, I’ll happily read silence7’s interesting links any time, but Patnou just asks weird questions over and over and I blocked them after a while. Weird questions may produce more engagement in the form of comments, but that’s a flawed metric because overall it’s just not interesting to see in the feed.

2

There's one reposter I want to block. But he has so many posts that his Mbin profile page refuses to load, and that's where the "block" button is...

2

If it hits my feed regularly and has no value or makes me cringe, hell yeah. We don't have an algorithm here to help you sort out the content, your subs and blocks do all the lifting.

Someone arguing in bad faith? Block.

Someone reposting the same drivel day after day? Block.

Don't care for the content of a community? block.

No need to fight, no need to complain, I have ~150 blocks, you're doing them and youself a favor.

2

I don't even know how to block. I don't want my experience to be an echo chamber plus creating new accounts is so easy that blocking doesn't avoid motivated spammers.

1

No users yet, but I’ve blocked a few communities, mostly ones in foreign (to me) languages. I do find myself regretting that I signed up for an instance that doesn’t allow downvotes; sometimes you see posts that really really need to be downvoted 😄

1
DeepDownreply
leminal.space

Crazy how you can always tell what somebody got ran off reddit for

Oh wait it's just cumfart again.

6
fizzlereply
quokk.au

LOL. When was the last time someone on Lemmy or reddit tried to understand your opposing viewpoint? Probably never.

4