this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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Bots can be extremely useful and the flexibility of where and how bots could work was one of the things that made Reddit popular. Before, well, y'know.
Bespoke bots can also allow particular communities to develop local features or functionality. I assume Lemmy's mod tools are fair bare bones right now too, so I suspect someone, somewhere is probably working on an automod toolkit.
Bots should be allowed, but must be flagged. I don't know if it's a default lemmy option, but the app I use has a toggle to hide bot accounts if you don't want to see them.
That said, I would very much prefer if bots were restricted to just making comments rather than posts. Certain communities have bots that automatically post article links and they completely blanket feeds sorted by new until you block the account.
I've started an account on Mastodon recently, and really noticed the bot accounts. If you accidentally follow one of the extremely active bots, all your feed becomes their posts. I don't think there's enough people on the Fediverse just yet to be able to drown those bots out when they show up.