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What is alien.top and why do all the users from there show up as bots and have no history? (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been seeing a lot of users from alien.top commenting in various threads (mainly sports) lately. They only caught my attention because they are all flagged as bots and I typically manually block most bots (not all because there are some I like). For every one of them their entire post history consists of 1-2 comments or posts. When I took a look at that instance there is nothing there at all and it also shows no users. The comments look human enough but I guess I wouldn't be surprised to learn that all the comments are LLM generated. Is alien.top just someones LLM experiment or is something else going on here?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Purely guessing, but maybe it's top comments from reddit?

Edit: pretty much, yeah

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If that's what it is the the way they're doing it is beyond obnoxious because I can't just block the whole thing. If I wanted reddit comments then I would be using reddit.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Luckily in a few weeks you can block entire instances natively within lemmy. In the mean time maybe your app allows filtering?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Will that also block all users from that instance? I was under the impression that it just blocked posts from that instance showing up in your feed.

Did we really need yet another reddit mirroring bot?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I personally requested it because this particular bot also mirrors comments, not just posts. And the two super niche communities it posts in are completely dead on lemmy, so im trying to revive them by having at least some updates, also so people dont have to go back to reddit just to get that niche content. https://communick.news/u/rglullis set it up.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

The bots are only posting to communities that have explicit approval from the mods. Are you subscribing to any of those communities or is your complaint because it is showing in your "all" feed?

Edit: Instead of downvoting, please explain what is your problem with it. I will be a lot more likely to make changes if there is reasonable feedback.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well I guess our problem with it is that we don't want a bot clogging up our feeds with content from Reddit and we would prefer if you shut it down.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Please, don't use the Royal We to make your argument. For every person complaining about the bots, I have two people asking for it and telling me that they are glad they can access content from the niche communities without having to access reddit.

Anyway, your beloved leaders at LW already defederated from alien.top, so there is nothing you have to worry about. Enjoy your sheltered life.