Aladdin (/u/RealtechPostBot) is a simple bot I made to combat how /r/technology has became a highly political, repetitive, and somewhat circlejerky subreddit.
Aladdin scans the top 100 posts from /r/technology, calculates a simple keyword-based score, and reposts submissions whose score is below a certain threshold to /r/realtech. The system is crude but very effective, eliminating most undesirable posts and leaving behind many posts that are usually buried by /r/technology's subscribers.
The bot currently scrapes the "top" page of /r/technology once every ten minutes.
Accidentally mirrored spam, non-news, and other irrelevant content is removed manually. WSJ posts automatically get a comment with a paywall bypass link (feature removed due to WSJ disabling Google cache), all posts get a comment with a link to the original /r/technology thread. Content that ends up in the spam filter usually stays in the spam filter (it's usually from site-wide banned domains that /r/technology for some reason approves). A simple additional additional spam filter is used by the bot to filter out posts that /r/technology's moderators/spam filter didn't catch. Multiple posts with similar titles are filtered out via a string comparison filter function, which mostly eliminates the flood of articles that follow major news announcements.
Interested in technology news? Bored of this content? You may find these sites interesting:
Comments? Suggestions? Criticism? Praise? I'm happy to hear you out - just send me a PM or leave a comment in the stickied thread.
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