How Reddit Crushed the Internet's Largest Protest

return2ozma@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 385 points –
How Reddit Crushed the Internet's Largest Protest
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Mind sharing which bots to block? Some bots are useful, so I'd rather not hide all bots.

If I did that I'd feel obligated to remove the user accounts I've blocked from my list before posting it and frankly that isn't worth the time or the trouble since I'd have to manually recheck all the accounts to see why I blocked them. No thanks lol.

I think it's pretty easy to replicate what I did with minimal effort though. All I really did was change the 'all' page in my Lemmy app (Boost) sorting to the newest posts. It becomes obvious pretty quickly when a couple communities have 4+ most recent posts, by the same accounts, etc. Most of the bots that exclusively repost reddit content are very obvious with just a couple clicks.

Once I had the worst offending reddit reposters blocked I noticed certain community/instance/users were either spamming content I'll never care about or were NSFW bots, or were too region specific, etc. so I blocked them too. I spent a day or two doing more blocking than browsing.

After that I changed the sorting on the 'all' page to active posts, which at that point was mostly posts by real people again. From there I've only had to block the odd account here and there like I would on any other social platform. Every so often I'll notice a bot post that's slipped through but if the community is active someone else has usually posted something similar that's getting more interaction anyways, so I don't feel like I'm missing out on much I'd be interested in or the stories that are actually newsworthy.