There is no reason for a bot to be able to access or post on federated social networks if the goal is to make social media humane.
For this reason, bots should be heavily disallowed from posting content to or accessing content from federated social media.
I can understand this take; I realize it probably boils down to personal preference, but seeing the mod bot with 2 of the top posts of the last 6 hours just feels like a bad look for a community to me. It’s stated purpose:
This is a relatively active community, and I don’t think it really needs to be “jump started” anymore. Let humans post the content. That’s what I want to see and engage with. I still think there is a place for bot posts, but with a much more limited scope (episode discussion threads, sports scores as was mentioned elsewhere, etc.). Nothing turns me off a community faster than seeing half the top post from a bot.
As a thought, I wonder how you’d feel if the bot account wasn’t clearly identified as a bot.
Using Voyager (wefwef) I can’t tell. So to me it’s just another account. It’s not in my face, it isn’t obvious, and most of the time I have no idea who posted anything. I see the title, I vote accordingly (or just move on), if it’s interesting I look at the comments.
To be clear bot accounts should 100% identify themselves as bots, but I wonder if making it too obvious is making them stand out too much.
(And of course if I saw “Bot” everywhere I might have a different opinion.)
That’s a good point. If I didn’t see that they were bot accounts it would probably be an ignorance-is-bliss situation. I just wouldn’t notice. Though, using desktop, it’s fairly obvious since most have the “b” next to their names that also include “bot”.
A lot of the time, you’ll see OP engage in the comments of what they post because they themselves have a personal interest in it. You don’t get that with bots. I have to wonder if bots are denying humans that chance. Someone goes to post something they found, but the reddit repost bot already pulled it from some subreddit’s new feed.
“Stealing” posts is a good argument against bots as well. As a user if, every time I went to post, my post was already “taken” then I’d be less likely to post in the future.
Although technically that’s true even without bots.
I do think limiting in general how often any one account can post makes sense, so I would extend that same rule to bots.
For “good” bots we could even request that they wait 24 hours before posting something new. (Of course if the rules are too strict we’ll just have bad bots and that defeats the point of having bot rules.)