If I see human-like comments from a bot account, I'll assume it's an LLM that's posting. I would prefer to keep the distinction and not have the provenance of content be more ambiguous than it already is. A human operator of a bot account should create a separate account to use as their account for commenting. Bot comments should only be auto-generated comments like the acronym-bot etc.

If they agree to mark their content as not original content in some way -> mark as bot
If they don't -> ban

A reposting bot from another social site should have its content labeled as such so that I can block it. This along with a profile option to automatically block such content would be perfect.

sometimes-bot is still a bot in my books

Low level curated stuff is tolerable. And i am not totally bothered about replying human or bot if a relevant or interesting post.

But the issue is volume and noise. A label would help me with sorting visually and practically. Something as simple as 'non human'

I hate the idea of this place just becoming a Reddit redirect, Personally i find it scummy behavior posting it. We left there for a reason. Do people actually like reddit reposts?

I feel this place needs space to grow define its own identity without a fifth column of reddit.

I think it is fine that an account marked as a bot occasionally has posts written by a human.

The opposite runs contrary to the whole logic of flagging content as bot generated. Most instances do not mind people creating multiple account, I think it is fair telling to that person "either be marked as bot or create an account that will be"

Bots help "run" the account so they should be marked as bots. No inbetween.

I wouldn't mind the reposters if they'd actually stay in the post and engage the community and comments, but when I take a look OP is nowhere to be seen. As long as they're engaging in their reposts and it's clear (maybe in the title or flair) that it's not their content, I'm okay with them getting conversations going.

They should be marked as bots so that people who don't want to see word for word reposts can filter them out.

If the majority of someone’s post are reposts of recent Reddit content it should be marked as a repost bot so people can choose if they want to engage with the content or not.

Before I change anything, it'd be really good to understand what the community wants to happen in response to this.

Spank 'em

All the re-posts definitely take away a good amount of fun for me. I'd like to connect to people and read original content, not ruminate on people's Reddit memes from a week ago?! It is popular to do it, though. But at a minimum, we should avoid this place becoming some sort of bot dumpster.

So we should definitely try to discourage this kind of behaviour. Proper way would be to ask them to use separate accounts for their genuine(?) content and bot activity. So the automatisms work out. If they can't be bothered to play by the rules and agreements here, they should be gone.

If they self identify as being a bot, ok. If not, ban.

Hi Rimu

I use a bot account on my lemmy instance that posts to two local communities. The account is labeled as a bot, although I will occasionally post from it and comment with it. All this is mentioned in the bot's account bio.

This is quite contrary to to what you link to though.

I think any account the posts other's stuff as OC suck ass, more so if it is a bot that the owner pretends is not a bot.

I'm not sure of the best way to tackle this though - just giving a little context

[edit] This bot acc is reading News RSS feeds not random Redshit content.
[edit 2] I also remove content it gets wrong - so is semi curated

I feel like automatically reposting content from external sources is not inherently a bad thing. But when they won't identify as a bot, that's going to be a red flag most of the time. And even if they aren't doing anything nefarious or disruptive, it still means posts are being made with little or no human input, which inevitably leads to lower quality.

At the very least, I'd say flag them with a separate tag. There's no harm in letting everyone know right away that an account is blasting out scripted posts and possibly pretending to be human.

I have mixed feelings about this issue.

On one hand, what you're saying makes a lot of sense.

On the other hand, some of my fave posts are from reposters, like BilSabab on !smorgasbordbizarre@lemmy.world, LadyButterfly on !nicememes@sopuli.xyz (and others), neuracnu on !trailers@lemmy.blahaj.zone, and m_f on !garfield@lemmy.world. In the first two cases there's a fair amount of curation, but in the second two cases less so.

So I guess my concern is that "restricting those kind of accounts completely" too enthusiastically might zap my fave reposters.

This behavior mostly doesn't bother me personally, but I do see folks being irritated when they realize the person they want to talk to isn't the poster receiving the notifications. The best solution is what we have for bluesky via brid.gy -- a relay that syncs posts and comments bidirectionally across Reddit and PieFed, but I suspect Reddit would charge you quite a lot of money to operate that, and a lot of instances would end up defederating from the relay anyway because they don't want their posts and comments to end up synced to corporate social media.

Maybe instead we could add the equivalent of a referrer field, call it "origin" or something? If the user is shoveling content from reddit, they can set it to reddit.com; if it's coming from instagram, they can set it to instagram.com. Possibly even the url of the originating thread? Idk. But then you can visually distinguish things that are um... manually federated? from those that are organically posted in the UI.

I think reposts should be labeled as such, maybe even an external distinction. Maybe have a way to identify OC content, otherwise assume it to be a repost? Links are obvious external references.

Automated accounts should be labeled as bots too, if it's possible to identify them. Bots are not inherently bad, but their use can be malicious.

I think having hidden administrator flags of certain content, trends, and mannerisms can be used to identify accounts. Obscure hidden defense mechanism is sometimes the best option, so that it's harder to game a system that's difficult to protect.