I block every one I see and my feed is better for it.

I block all Reddit content when I see it. The bots themselves, the lemmit instances, everything.

I like it to keep track of communities that don’t have enough members here to be very active. I don’t participate in the discussions, but it’s good in case some news come out that I would miss otherwise.

Lemmit.online is also good, because it actually lets you know that it’s mirroring reddit. There was another instance that was mirroring reddit including comments, without any indication. I started “participating” in the discussions until I caught on to the fact that I wasn’t getting any answers or up- or downvotes because it was just full of bots. It soon landed on my blacklist.

They have their uses. In the Canadian version of r/BuildAPCsale or whatever it’s called, it’s great – get the information about the sale and a link to the product.

In r/relationships, and the entire post and discussion are about OP’s problem, they’re completely useless.

I block them because it’s pretty pointless to engage with when OP isn’t there to see your comments. On the other hand if these bots scraping reddit costs reddit money then that’s cool.

I don’t mind too much when it comes to news, or other articles… Even pictures and memes… Whatever.

The one that confuses the shit out of me is stuff that’s supposed to be interactive, like AMA or AITA or something. OP will never see the replies, so… Why?

Something like the news can have very different discussions depending on who is in the community/subreddit where it was posted, meanwhile, posts asking for help or something… The entire point is to give OP a solution/answer to their inquiry. Why make a bot to bring that question to Lemmy when OP won’t be aware it happened, and will have no way to know that responses have been given here? It’s dumb.

There’s still a lot of things that are being posted both to Reddit and Lemmy, and having that done by a bot instead of a person… Well, I’m not mad at it. It’s coming here one way or another.

I’m of the opinion that populating lemmy with bots mirroring reddit content does not add any value to the threadiverse. Lemmy would be better served by everyone finding one article, image, video, whatever, each day and posting it in a relevant community, than by everyone setting up bots to spam the ALL feed with random content from reddit. So I try my best to do exactly that.

Repost bots are a soulless, sad attempt to bloat Lemmy with content.

Looks at c/Superbowl vs c/Capybaras.

Both are clones of their Reddit counterpart, but Superbowls has actual fresh content from users here on Lemmy, and is quite active as a result.
Capybaras is just sad reposting from Reddit. Each post has little to no engagement

There are certain niches where automated mirroring is a little useful.

Game day threads, part sales (where people need to be quick) are a couple examples.

I have most post bots blocked though (lemmit, alien, lululemon, etc.).

Like others said the downsides are that they drown out original posts and discussions with authors that never respond to comments. Consequently, the not-logged-in experience on instances that “leave it up to users to block” will appear messy and full of garbage.

I think they have their place but those automated should be contained to communities that want them, easily identified, easy to block and post rate limited to reasonable levels.

A yet to be developed feature in Lemmy would be the ability to somehow “opt-in follow” automated bot posts rather than the current “opt-out” model.

I completely blocked lemmit.online using the handy dandy instance block feature because i just do not give a fuck about Reddit and none of the reposted content is even good.

it fills up my subscribed/all page with so much spam that I can no longer see any of the naturally generated lemmy user content, there is zero activity on any post, and nobody on reddit will see anything if I comment.

I’ve unsubbed from any comms that had them. They all become ghost towns with zero discussion.

They are spam bots that should be blocked instantly.