META: Posting Links to Buy Things
I'm curious what everyone thinks about the posts that have shown up here that are simply a link to purchase an item on Amazon?
These posts are coming from users that don't have any other engagement other than these posts. This does not seem like a good-faith effort to engage with the community, but rather a cheap attempt to generate clicks and sales.
I would like to see these posts banned, but I'm curious how the rest of the community feels.
These are spam. Please keep reporting these, we ban the users from the site and remove the content.
On a side note, have you considered affiliate links to support the site? I'm usually against them, but if it would help the site and they are genuinely good products that everyone here supports, then I wouldn't be averse to using them. Although I believe affiliate links are not as lucrative as they used to be.
There's some interesting questions being raised about the report function over here: https://tkohhh.social/post/10726
The following people get a report when content is reported:
This makes my queue a mess at times, especially because federation is not instant and many apps cache content. I've had people on Beehaw report content on Beehaw that was already removed hours ago. When someone spams a bunch of content across communities on the fediverse (such as today with a prolific spammer) we can sometimes have dozens of reports for the same user because of all the reports generated above.
Thank you for clarifying this. I'm going to post this information over on that thread just for visibility. Thanks again!
Haven't considered anything outside of donations at this time. We post regular financial updates, here's our most recent.
Those are bots and should be considered spam. Ban them on site.
These are affiliate link, they are trying to make money, not doing a good faith effort to participate or better the community.
I’ve been reporting them. It seems that a lot of the posts contain affiliate links, so it’s someone trying to make money from that - not because they wrote the books that are getting posted.
Some have been banned, but they keep coming back. Some may be bots, but not all - I saw at least one come back with a hateful response when called out.
I haven't been reporting since it's not clear that it's a violation of any rules. I guess that's what I'm hoping to clarify with this post.
The ones I’ve been reporting have all been lemm.ee users and it is a violation of the lemm.ee rules to use your account to advertise on lemm.ee or any other instance. I don’t know how other instances are handling it.
I actually don’t know who gets the reports I’ve been submitting, either, so I’m not sure if it’s doing anything.
Oh, and I also suspect the user(s?) doing this is using other accounts to upvote the posts.
Yeah, that's what I was figuring as well. This is one downside to not allowing downvotes... they would get buried pretty quickly if we could downvote them.
Oh that’s funny, I forgot beehaw didn’t have downvotes. I actually can downvote and see the downvotes, but maybe those are just going off into the ether.
Ban, slam, goodbye bot I say
I've also been reporting them as spam (although I think my reports failed because I'm on an unstable app).
Sometimes it's useful, just don't use THEIR links. :) LOL. Just reported like 4 of them.
Someone posted the other night that America's Test Kitchen has a cookbook that covers all 23 seasons of the show, so I opened my Amazon app, found it on my own along with the matching Cook's Country book and bought both of them.
Not affiliate links:
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Americas-Kitchen-Cookbook-2001-2023/dp/1954210108/
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Cooks-Country-Show-Cookbook/dp/1954210574/