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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
People are causing confusion when using account to both repost messages, which are sometimes written in the first person, and writing their own posts in the first person.
It seems fair to label them as bot or similar if the amount of (presumably automatic) reposts cross a threshold. It would be nice to make it possible to remove the label after they stop mixing both activities within the same account.
If the platform is too accomodating with accounts that mix artificial and human content, expect bots and LLMs account to abuse the rules and claim they are partially human curated. It's going to be impossible to verify and a nightmare to moderate.
And we already got that. "I'm using AI (just) for translation" is one of the excuses I keep reading. And I have a hunch some people prompted their "AI agents" to say that, because their post will be promoting some vibe-coded stuff and their comments are filled with ChatGPT-isms. It's really a nightmare for mods who want to do the right thing.
And I second people re-posting blog posts and quoting the first-person speech without making it clear it's a quote. Always makes it seem we have zero original content here, just pull in some from other people. But we do have original content. It's just far and in between and we need to come up with a way to make it more prominent.