Recently there have started to be a few accounts that seem to be used by a person for writing comments while also being used by scripts to automatically repost content from Reddit and possibly elsewhere. This doesn't cleanly fit into our existing tools for classifying accounts and posts - a conventional bot might post RSS articles or other automated content, and users can choose to filter based on that bot setting. These new types of accounts are different from that because they're partly human and partly automated.

This causes a few problems:

• there are cases where the reposted content is written in the first person. Like for example, a Reddit post might say here's a photo of my cat, but when that post is automatically reposted into the Threadiverse by a reposter script, it can appear to us that the PyFed account owner is claiming the cat as their own. Yet that's obviously not the case, which gives an inauthentic feel to the environment.

• sometimes some of the material being reposted is content that violates the rules and norms of Threadiverse. And so we see a lot of strange culture war stuff and racist content coming through sometimes.

• a lot of people left reddit to get away from all the astroturfing and bots and LLMs running amok so letting that happen here too will just drive those people away.

Despite this, their content is often quite popular and many people upvote it and comment on it. Many people seem totally ok with it.

Before I change anything, it'd be really good to understand what the community wants to happen in response to this. I'm considering several possible approaches, including doing nothing, or introducing a new automated / reposted indicator for accounts (with a feed filter, separate from the bot indicator and filter), or continuing to apply the existing bot label onto those accounts, or restricting those kind of accounts completely. But I'm not going to propose a particular outcome yet. I'd like to hear what, if any, problems people are experiencing from these accounts and what information or controls would be useful.