Hi folks! I just came up with something, no idea if its good but you judge that:
TL;DR: Can we make a browser extention or something that gives us a button to copy an entire comment chain with crucial, niche advice to a lemmy post or is that gone since the API went down?
I often google things for work and hobbies, code snippets, log entries, ways to make my insane docker setups work. For example, I got a lemmy instance working in docker with this.
Very often, I end up on reddit. If the post or comment in question is helpful, I’d like to upvote or ask a follow up question. For that I still need my reddit account.
But for the “praise helpful comment” I could also do that here. Some people link to the comment/post which also brings back traffic to reddit (which I dont like).
So I’d probably just copy the post (and/or comment chain in question) to a new post on lemmy.
It would go a little like this:
- User1: “Post describing a topic”
- User2: Helpful comment nr 1
- User1: Follow up question
- User2: Helpful comment nr 2
For that, I’d need some kind of automation. Since the API is gone, I don’t know if that is possible but the option to “copy entire comment chain up to this comment” would definitely be awesome.
Feel free to tell me otherwise.
Edit: If this isn’t obvious: It would accumulate the most helpful stuff from reddit on here without it being blindly crossposted by bots and would push google results (because its niche!) and most likely not a copyright issue because it is so few things that it should fly under the radar.
I’m no coder but I think that this could work. I picture something like this.
- Create a Lemmy comm. Let’s call it c/redditimports.
- The only user allowed to post in c/redditimports is a bot, let’s call it u/Ribbit (Reddit Import Bot, Busy Importing Threads.). However everyone can comment in it.
- There’s always one pinned thread in c/redditimports. In that thread, humans can comment which Reddit threads+comment chains they want to import from Reddit to Lemmy. They do it by pinging u/Ribbit, then providing links to 2+ comments in the same thread.
- When u/Ribbit is pinged, it checks if someone provided it some Reddit comment links. If they’re valid, u/Ribbit creates a new post in c/redditimports, and fills it with content from: the Reddit post, the Reddit comments directly linked, their parents, grandparents etc., recursively.
Now here’s the hard part - someone coding the bot. Preferably in a way that Reddit doesn’t tell it apart from an actual human being, as Reddit Inc. and Greedy Pigboy will certainly not like it.
Also, don’t worry about lowering Reddit dependency. Bots there will do it for us, the immigration leftover is already complaining about it.
We already have something extremely similar, a bot instance that reposts content from subs that users request. It is incredibly useless in reality, and really spamming the shit out of my feed. The first user I blocked.
There is not much use in third hand content that suggests a discussion, while it isn’t being discussed here. Now don’t get me wrong, I’d love for reddit to up and die, but it isn’t happening yet if we are being realistic and won’t happen by artificially creating zombie repost content on Lemmy.
Id rather we had more content creators to provide valuable OC.
An important key difference is that the bot that you’re talking about mirrors whole subreddits, regardless of people interacting with it; while my suggestion is a bot that copies specific threads upon user request. As such the later would generate considerably less noise, enough to keep it contained to a single comm.
There is not much use in third hand content that suggests a discussion, while it isn’t being discussed here.
OP proposed a use - building a knowledge base here that could attract other users.
Id rather we had more content creators to provide valuable OC.
I agree with you but I don’t think that we need to choose between one or another.